CloudSitter

The adventures of CloudSat's JPL summer Communications intern Disclaimer:This is NOT an official NASA or JPL blog.

[cloudsitter]

Hey I was wondering if there was a video or article that could help me understand how the 2C-SNOW-PROFILE works. The algorithm is a bit confusing. I'm writing a report based on paper about how ground clutter affects snowfall retrieval data over Antarctica and Greenland. Any ideas?

Hey there! Sorry for the delay in answering! Message me off-anon so I can toss you my email and follow up with my cloudsat people and try to get you a good answer? Thanks!

[cloudsitter]

Guess who just realized their theme made it impossible to read the nice captions I added?

Me, yeah. It’s fixed now! 

[nasa]

Views of Pluto

10 Images to Celebrate the Historic Exploration of the Pluto System

One year ago, our New Horizons mission made history by exploring Pluto and its moons – giving humankind our first close-up look at this fascinating world on the frontier of our solar system.

Since those amazing days in July 2015, the New Horizons spacecraft has transmitted numerous images and many other kinds of data home for scientists and the public alike to study, analyze, and just plain love. From Pluto’s iconic “heart” and sweeping ice-mountain vistas to its flowing glaciers and dramatic blue skies, it’s hard to pick just one favorite picture. So the mission team has picked 10 – and in no special order, placed them here.

Click the titles for more information about each image. You’ve seen nine of them before, and the team added a 10th favorite, also sure to become one of New Horizons’ “greatest hits.”

Vast Glacial Flows

In the northern region of Pluto’s Sputnik Planum, swirl-shaped patterns of light and dark suggest that a surface layer of exotic ices has flowed around obstacles and into depressions, much like glaciers on Earth.

Jagged Ice Shorelines and Snowy Pits

This dramatic image from our New Horizons spacecraft shows the dark, rugged highlands known as Krun Macula (lower right), which border a section of Pluto’s icy plains.

Blue Skies

Pluto’s haze layer shows its blue color in this picture taken by the New Horizons Ralph/Multispectral Visible Imaging Camera (MVIC). The high-altitude haze is thought to be similar in nature to that seen at Saturn’s moon Titan.

Charon Becomes a Real World

At half the diameter of Pluto, Charon is the largest satellite relative to its planet in the solar system. Many New Horizons scientists expected Charon to be a monotonous, crater-battered world; instead, they’re finding a landscape covered with mountains, canyons, landslides, surface-color variations and more. 

The Vistas of Pluto

Our New Horizons spacecraft looked back toward the sun and captured this near-sunset view of the rugged, icy mountains and flat ice plains extending to Pluto’s horizon. The backlighting highlights over a dozen layers of haze in Pluto’s tenuous but distended atmosphere.

The Dynamic Duo: Pluto and Charon in Enhanced Color

The color and brightness of both Pluto and Charon have been processed identically to allow direct comparison of their surface properties, and to highlight the similarity between Charon’s polar red terrain and Pluto’s equatorial red terrain. Pluto and Charon are shown with approximately correct relative sizes, but their true separation is not to scale. 

Strange Snakeskin Terrain

A moment’s study reveals surface features that appear to be texturally ‘snakeskin’-like, owing to their north-south oriented scaly raised relief. A digital elevation model created by the New Horizons’ geology shows that these bladed structures have typical relief of about 550 yards (500 meters). Their relative spacing of about 3-5 kilometers makes them some of the steepest features seen on Pluto.

Pluto’s Heart

This view is dominated by the large, bright feature informally named the “heart,” which measures approximately 1,000 miles (1,600 kilometers) across. The heart borders darker equatorial terrains, and the mottled terrain to its east (right) are complex. However, even at this resolution, much of the heart’s interior appears remarkably featureless—possibly a sign of ongoing geologic processes.

Far Away Snow-Capped Mountains

One of Pluto’s most identifiable features, Cthulhu (pronounced kuh-THU-lu) stretches nearly halfway around Pluto’s equator, starting from the west of the great nitrogen ice plains known as Sputnik Planum. Measuring approximately 1,850 miles (3,000 kilometers) long and 450 miles (750 kilometers) wide, Cthulhu is a bit larger than the state of Alaska.

Colorful Composition Maps of Pluto

The powerful instruments on New Horizons not only gave scientists insight on what Pluto looked like, their data also confirmed (or, in many cases, dispelled) their ideas of what Pluto was made of. These compositional maps – assembled using data from the Linear Etalon Imaging Spectral Array (LEISA) component of the Ralph instrument – indicate the regions rich in ices of methane (CH4), nitrogen (N2) and carbon monoxide (CO),  and, of course, water ice (H2O).

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[cloudsitter]

I went to a talk last week by Dr. Buratti, who is part of the New Horizons team, and I learned so much about my favorite planet-non-planet (who doesn’t love an underdog these days?). Cthulu (name still pending approval from the IAU), the dark spot to the left of the heart, is dominated by water ice - which you can see in the final picture! To the right of the heart, Buratti told us was a feature that they believed was an ice volcano, though likely not active any longer. The other crazy finding was how bright pluto was - it’s max reflectivity (in the heart, mainly) is 0.95, which means it reflects 95% of the light that hits it in some places! In others, it’s 0.08, which is just a little darker than our Moon (at 0.10). 

The New Horizons team is still receiving data, too! Dr. Buratti said they have about 10% left to receive, but that final 10% is geological photos, which should be really interesting!

[cloudsitter]

I got lost doing a mysteries and curiosities tour (building 150 had a picture of 144 and vice versa and 144 had no curiosity on the building at all) and a really awesome guy offered to give me a tour of the thermal vacuum testing area! I told him I'm working with CloudSat and he told me a story. Apparently the testing for CloudSat took 10 months (almost too long) because there was some potting that started heating up at vacuum temperatures and it started making chronas (the crew suggested calling the ghost busters because you could see a little blue thing floating around inside and it seemed that they were haunted). Apparently the solution was a different part, but the company didn't/couldn't ship it so a 60 year old woman from JPL with a PhD and everything flew to Canada to pick it up. They wouldn't let her on a plane back to California with it so she rented a car and drove back cross country through a blizzard to make sure the part arrived on time. If she hadn't, they wouldn't have fixed the problem in time and JPL was ready to pull the plug on the mission. As it was, thanks to her they finished testing with 2 weeks left to the mission drop deadline. Crazy, the things it takes and that people will do for these missions! It's insane to think that if that single part hadn't arrived, CloudSat would not be flying ten years later.

[cloudsitter]

CloudSat is celebrating it’s 10th anniversary this year! Which is absolutely incredible, considering that when it was proposed, the estimated lifetime was 2 years, with a maximum of 3. CloudSat is part of the A-Train of satellites, which, logically, orbit the earth in a little satellite train, taking the same path. 

5 years into CloudSat’s mission, however, it suffered a critical battery problem. If you’ve ever had a laptop with a bad battery that you had to remove, the laptop would only work while plugged into a power source. The same thing happened to CloudSat, except the power source is the sun, not a cable. This means that CloudSat only works during the daytime. Because of this, CloudSat had to move positions in the A-Train - it used to be in front of CALIPSO by 15 seconds, but it had to drop behind CALIPSO since it cannot accurately and safely adjust position without power when it’s in nighttime. 

Because CloudSat gathers data in a 2D curtain (almost like it’s slicing clouds as it travels), it and CALIPSO used to gather data in the exact same location since they passed so close together. After the battery issues, CloudSat hasn’t been able to keep directly behind CALIPSO, so their data can’t be combined with the same lack of error as they used to be. 

Despite this critical issue, which could have ended a mission, CloudSat is still going 5 years later! 

Art:  Useful Pursuit of Shadows G.Stephens, 2003 Oil and Acrylic on canvas, 48in x 60in

[cloudsitter]

Hello world!

I’ve just started my summer internship here at JPL as a Communications student working under the CloudSat project. I just received permission from my supervisor to create this blog, so I’ll be here all summer writing up interesting things I learn at JPL or about CloudSat, as well as being here to answer any questions anyone may be interested in asking (to the best of my ability; if I cannot answer due to privacy issues/classified info, I’ll let you know)! 

I know this summer will be amazing, and I hope you all stick around for the ride with me!