* Astronomy

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RE: Aquarius/SAC-D Mission

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Delta 2 rocket ready for liftoff

The United Launch Alliance-built Delta 2 rocket is aiming to get off the ground at 7:20 a.m. Thursday from Space Launch Complex-2 at Vandenberg. The Aquarius/SAC-D mission has just five minutes a day to launch so the satellite can be placed in the proper orbit.
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New NASA Salt Mapper to Spice Up Climate Forecasts

Salt is essential to human life. Most people don't know, however, that salt -- in a form nearly the same as the simple table variety -- is just as essential to Earth's ocean, serving as a critical driver of key ocean processes. While ancient Greek soothsayers believed they could foretell the future by reading the patterns in sprinkled salt, today's scientists have learned that they can indeed harness this invaluable mineral to foresee the future -- of Earth's climate.
The oracles of modern climate science are the computer models used to forecast climate change. These models, which rely on a myriad of data from many sources, are effective in predicting many climate variables, such as global temperatures. Yet data for some pieces of the climate puzzle have been scarce, including the concentration of dissolved sea salt at the surface of the world's ocean, commonly called ocean surface salinity, subjecting the models to varying margins of error. This salinity is a key indicator of how Earth's freshwater moves between the ocean, land and atmosphere.
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For Aquarius, Sampling Seas No 'Grain of Salt' Task

The breakthrough moment for oceanographer Gary Lagerloef, the principal investigator for NASA's new Aquarius mission, came in 1991. That's when he knew it would be possible to make precise measurements of ocean salinity from space. It has taken nearly two decades to turn that possibility into a reality.
Lagerloef was looking at data collected by a NASA aircraft flying over the ocean off the coast of Maryland. It was testing a new radiometer, an instrument that can sense thermal signals emitted by land, clouds and the ocean surface. The instrument not only captured the unique signature of dissolved salt in the surface water below, it showed how the water's salt content varied from one side of the Gulf Stream to the other.
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Aquarius: Studying the Salt of the Sea

One of the keys to understanding climate change may be found in the salt
of the sea.
NASA's salt-seeking Aquarius ascends to the heavens this June.

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NASA Mission Will Observe Earth's Salty Seas

Final preparations are under way for the June 9 launch of the international Aquarius/SAC-D observatory. The mission's primary instrument, Aquarius, will study interactions between ocean circulation, the water cycle and climate by measuring ocean surface salinity.
Engineers at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California are performing final tests before mating Aquarius/SAC-D to its Delta II rocket. The mission is a collaboration between NASA and Argentina's space agency, Comision Nacional de Actividades Espaciales (CONAE), with participation from Brazil, Canada, France and Italy. SAC stands for Satelite de Applicaciones Cientificas. Aquarius was built by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., and the agency's Goddard Space Flight Centre in Greenbelt, Md.
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NASA will hold a news briefing on Tuesday, May 17, at 10 a.m. PDT (1 p.m. EDT), on the agency's next Earth-observing satellite mission, Aquarius/SAC-D, scheduled to launch on June 9.
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Aquarius instrument

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Argentinian Satélite de Aplicaciones Científicas Mission

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RE: Aquarius/SAC-D Mission