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SpaceX launches NASA’s $948 million PACE environmental research satellite
SpaceX launched an environmental research satellite for NASA early Thursday, a nearly $1 billion spacecraft that survived multiple cancellation threats and is now poised to shed new light on climate change and the complex interplay of heat-trapping carbon, aerosols and sea life on global scales.
The Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud, ocean Ecosystem mission — PACE — “will dramatically advance our understanding of the relationship between aerosols and clouds, and the global energy balance,” said Karen St. Germain, director of NASA’s Earth sciences division. “This is one of the biggest sources of uncertainty in our ability to model the climate.”
NASA
She said PACE is “going to teach us about the oceans in the same way that Webb (the James Webb Space Telescope) is teaching us about the cosmos.” And that includes “a tremendous amount about ocean biology.”
“This is going to really center around understanding phytoplankton, these very small (organisms) that live in the ocean, that are at the foundation of life in our oceans in general.”
Oceans cover 70 percent of the planet’s surface, she added, “and yet the oceans are one of the least well understood parts of the Earth system. PACE is going to profoundly advance our understanding of how the oceans work and how life in the oceans is related to life on land.”
Running two days late because of high winds at the launch site, the mission began at 1:33 a.m. EST Thursday when the nine first stage engines powering a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket roared to life, lighting up the deep overnight sky across Cape Canaveral.
NASA
Putting on a spectacular show, the Falcon 9 arced away on a southerly trajectory over the Atlantic Ocean just off the eastern coast of Florida as it climbed toward a 420-mile-high orbit around Earth’s poles.
Polar orbits allow Earth-observation satellites, weather stations and reconnaissance platforms to view the entire planet as it rotates below. Tuesday’s launching marked the first polar launch from the East Coast for the U.S. government since 1960 when a rocket went awry and debris fell on Cold War-era Cuba and killed a cow.
Since then, NASA and the Pentagon have launched polar payloads from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California.
But SpaceX successfully launched a Falcon 9 to polar orbit from Florida in August 2020 and has since launched multiple payloads on such southerly trajectories. With PACE, NASA agreed government safety requirements had been met.
Trajectories and launch sites aside, the PACE mission had a rocky road to the launch pad. The Trump administration made multiple attempts to cancel the project, in part to devote more resources to NASA’s accelerated moon program. But Congress did not go along, and funding was added back to the agency’s budget each time.
“I’m not going to dive into policy or politics, but it’s been a really remarkable journey,” said Jeremy Werdell, PACE project scientist. He credited support from the science community, NASA and the public for keeping the program on track and boosting morale throughout.
NASA
The PACE satellite, built at NASA’s Goddard Spaceflight Center in Greenbelt, Md., is equipped with three instruments: a hyper-spectral color camera and two light-analyzing polarimeters, one providing wide-angle views of polarized light reflected from land, sea and the atmosphere below and the other providing a narrow-angle view.
“It’s a three-instrument payload and frankly, the technology really just operates like your eyes do,” Werdell said. “We are looking for interactions of sunlight — photons, quanta — with the atmosphere, ocean and land. Whatever those photons touch, they get absorbed or they get scattered, and then the instrument sees what they are.”
Despite its name, PACE “is not an ocean mission. It’s not an atmosphere mission. It’s not a land mission. It’s an all-of-those-things mission,” Werdell said.
“And that is so incredibly important, because you can’t understand one without understanding the other. … This is a mission that we don’t know what we’re going to learn about. And that is so deeply exciting.”
PACE is expected to provide high-precision data allowing researchers to fine-tune computer models, giving policy makers more accurate information about ongoing trends and long-term threats. It will also provide real-time measurements of aerosol movement through the atmosphere, plankton health and carbon transport.
“Understanding how ocean life interacts with the atmosphere and the global climate is one of the secrets of the universe right here at home,” said NASA Associate Administrator Jim Free.
“Aerosols that cycle through the ocean and atmosphere are a factor in how clouds form and how weather systems behave. But exactly how that process works is a scientific mystery. Unraveling it is one big goal of the PACE mission.”
Kate Calvin, NASA’s chief scientist and senior climate advisor, said the last 10 years have been the hottest since record keeping began, reflecting an overall warming trend driven in large part by greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide.
“As carbon dioxide is released, some of it is absorbed by land, some of it is absorbed by the ocean, and some stays in the atmosphere trapping heat,” she said. “Greenhouse gases aren’t the only factors affecting temperature, there’s also these tiny particles called aerosols that reflect or absorb sunlight and also affect cloud formation.
“PACE is going to provide more information on oceans and atmosphere, including providing new ways to study how the ocean and atmosphere exchange carbon. It’s also going to give us information on aerosols, information that helps us understand long-term climate.”
The PACE satellite, its Falcon 9 rocket and mission operations are costing NASA $948 million. After extensive tests and instrument calibration, science observations are expected to begin in about two months.
While the design life calls for a three-year mission, project officials are optimistic the spacecraft will operate for 10 years or more when all is said and done.
Serving in the U.S. House of Representatives comes with a six-figure salary, along with perks including paid travel and housing costs.
While the $174,000 annual pay likely doesn’t sound too shabby to those living in a country where the median individual wage comes to just over $59,000 a year, members of Congress are earning wages that were set in 2009. They haven’t gotten an automatic cost-of-living adjustment since 2009.
In getting elected as Speaker of the House in October of 2023, Louisiana Republican Mike Johnson’s annual salary jumped to $223,500. Louisiana Republican Steve Scalise and New York Democrat Hakeem Jeffries each make $193,4000 a year as the House majority and minority leaders, respectively.
Members of Congress are not allowed to continue in their prior jobs while working on Capitol Hill, although their net worth continues to increase through investments. Indeed, many Washington, D.C., lawmakers were already millionaires when they began their political careers, especially in the Senate.
Although pensions are increasingly uncommon for most American workers, the perk is alive and well for lawmakers. Since 1946, members of Congress with at least five years of service or federal employment are eligible for “a generous pension that pays two to three times more than pensions offered to similarly salaried workers in the private sector,” according to the National Taxpayers Union Foundation.
The value of the pension benefit is determined based on when a lawmakers was elected to office, time served and the average of the three years of their highest salary, noted NTUF, an affiliate of the National Taxpayers Union.
A lesser-known congressional benefit is the practice of leaving death gratuity payments to the heirs of members who die while serving in office. Equal to the member’s yearly congressional salary, the payments are provided regardless of how wealthy the deceased lawmaker was. From 2000 to 2021, the payments have cost taxpayers $5 million, the nonprofit research group found.
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2 shot dead, 4 wounded by Mexico’s National Guard on migrant smuggling route near U.S. border
Mexico’s National Guard fatally shot two Colombians and wounded four others in what the Defense Department claimed was a confrontation near the U.S. border.
Colombia’s foreign ministry said in a statement Sunday that all of the victims were migrants who had been “caught in the crossfire.” It identified the dead as a 20-year-old man and a 37-year-old woman, and gave the number of Colombians wounded as five, not four. There was no immediate explanation for the discrepancy. The victims were identified by the foreign ministry as Yuli Vanessa Herrera Marulanda and Ronaldo Andrés Quintero Peñuelas.
Mexico’s Defense Department, which controls the National Guard, did not respond to requests for comment Monday on whether the victims were migrants, but it said one Colombian who was not injured in the shootings was turned over to immigration officials, suggesting they were.
If they were migrants, it would mark the second time in just over a month that military forces in Mexico have opened fire on and killed migrants.
On Oct. 1, the day President Claudia Sheinbaum took office, soldiers opened fire on a truck, killing six migrants in the southern state of Chiapas. An 11-year-old girl from Egypt, her 18-year-old sister and a 17-year-old boy from El Salvador died in that shooting, along with people from Peru and Honduras.
The most recent shootings happened Saturday on a dirt road near Tecate, east of Otay Mesa on the California border, that is frequently used by Mexican migrant smugglers, the department said in a statement late Sunday.
The Defense Department said a militarized National Guard patrol came under fire after spotting two vehicles — a gray pickup and a white SUV — in the area, which is near an informal border crossing and wind power generation plant known as La Rumorosa.
One truck sped off and escaped. The National Guard opened fire on the other truck, killing two Colombians and wounding four others. There was no immediate information on their conditions, and there were no reported casualties among the guardsmen involved.
One Colombian and one Mexican man were found and detained unharmed at the scene, and the departments said officers found a pistol and several magazines commonly used for assault rifles at the scene.
Colombians have sometimes been recruited as gunmen for Mexican drug cartels, which are also heavily involved in migrant smuggling. But the fact the survivor was turned over to immigration officials and that the Foreign Relations Department contacted the Colombian consulate suggests they were migrants.
Cartel gunmen sometimes escort or kidnap migrants as they travel to the U.S. border. One possible scenario was that armed migrant smugglers may have been in one or both of the trucks, but that the migrants were basically unarmed bystanders.
The defense department said the three National Guard officers who opened fire have been taken off duty while the incident is being investigated.
Former president Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who left office Sept. 30, gave the military an unprecedentedly wide role in public life and law enforcement; he created the militarized Guard and used the combined military forces as the country’s main law enforcement agencies, supplanting police. The Guard has since been placed under the control of the army.
But critics say the military is not trained to do civilian law enforcement work. Moreover, lopsided death tolls in such confrontations – in which all the deaths and injuries occur on one side – raise suspicions among activists whether there really was a confrontation.
For example, the soldiers who opened fire in Chiapas – who have been detained pending charges – claimed they heard “detonations” prior to opening fire. There was no indication any weapons were found at the scene.
A Kenyan man was convicted Monday of plotting a 9/11-style attack on a U.S. building on behalf of the terrorist organization al-Shabab.
A federal jury in Manhattan found Cholo Abdi Abdullah guilty on all six counts he faced for conspiring to hijack an aircraft and slam it into a building, according to court records.
He’s due to be sentenced next March and faces a mandatory minimum of 20 years in prison.
Handout / Criminal Investigation and Detection Group
Abdullah represented himself during the trial, which opened last week. He declined to give an opening statement and did not actively participate in questioning witnesses.
In court papers filed ahead of the trial, prosecutors said Abdullah intended to “merely sit passively during the trial, not oppose the prosecution and whatever the outcome, he would accept the outcome because he does not believe that this is a legitimate system.”
Lawyers appointed to assist Abdullah in his self-defense didn’t respond to an email seeking comment Monday.
Federal prosecutors, who rested their case Thursday, said Abdullah plotted the attack for four years, undergoing extensive training in explosives and how to operate in secret and avoid detection.
He then moved to the Philippines in 2017 and began training as a commercial pilot.
Abdullah was almost finished with his two-year pilot training when he was arrested in 2019 on local charges.
He was transferred the following year to U.S. law enforcement authorities, who charged him with terrorism-related crimes.
Prosecutors said Abdullah also researched how to breach a cockpit door and information “about the tallest building in a major U.S. city” before he was caught.
The State Department in 2008 designated al-Shabab, which means “the youth” in Arabic, as a foreign terrorist organization. The militant group is an al Qaeda affiliate that has fought to establish an Islamic state in Somalia based on Shariah law.
