A long-standing climate change collaboration between Canadian space entities may be a part of NASA’s newly announced Earth System Observatory.
The Aerosol, Cloud, Convection and Precipitation (A-CCP) study is considering designs for atmospheric observations for possible future inclusion in the Observatory. Canada has been invited to develop three instruments for a mission so far expected to launch in 2029, studying aerosols, clouds, atmospheric convection and precipitation to improve forecasts of air quality, climate and weather.
The study team is broad, according to the A-CCP website, including representatives from several NASA centers as well as space agencies in Canada, France, Japan and Germany. Canada’s collaboration not only includes the Canadian Space Agency (CSA), however, but also Environment and Climate Change Canada (ECCC) along with Canadian academic partners – continuing a longstanding practice by CSA to include other stakeholders in its projects.
While NASA just announced its planned Earth System Observatory set of five satellites late last month, A-CCP has been ongoing since 2018 for a planned, initial three-year study. Work on the various Canadian instruments dates years before that, in one case back to approximately 2003, CSA’s Thomas Piekutowski, program manager of sun-Earth system sciences, told SpaceQ.
“Instruments can be kind of slow in development, and then sometimes there’s no work done on them for two years. It’s not surprising that it can take that long,” he said, noting it is common for space projects anywhere in the world to take years or even decades to accomplish.
NASA’s Earth System Observatory, however, represents a strong opportunity for A-CCP to get a chance at spaceflight. It’s aligned closely with the Biden administration’s focus on climate science; the White House stated the new NASA observatory is essential because “the ability to forecast and monitor natural disasters is integral for the nation’s preparation, mitigation, and resilience.”
Meanwhile, new NASA administrator Bill Nelson said in his State of NASA 2021 speech June 4 that the NASA observatory “will better help America and the world, with better data to track natural hazards including hurricanes.”
After several BuyandSell.gc.ca tenders and contracts (listed below), A-CCP just completed a pre-acquisition strategy meeting dry run in May and a mission concept review is currently scheduled for February 2022. A key decision point is then expected next March, according to the A-CCP website.
“The instruments themselves have all had some form of previous incarnation … and they’ve all flown in one form or another on aircraft or balloons,” Piekutowski said. “Current studies with industry are aiming to optimize the designs. They look at technical design tradeoffs and technology tradeoffs because sometimes you can use one or more technologies to accomplish the same goal … we’d [also] like to have cost estimates, and that work should wrap up by the end of 2021.”
Piekutowski cautioned that any next stages “all depends on funding” in association with governance questions and affordability. A consortium of Canadian universities are considering a funding request to the Canada Foundation for Innovation. Meanwhile, community engagement is ongoing; for example, several papers about A-CCP were recently presented at the 55th Canadian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society (CMOS) virtual congress that ran from May 31 to June 11, Piekutowski said.
Canada’s proposed contribution to A-CCP includes the following, according to a December 2020 blog post on CSA’s website:
- ALI (Aerosol Limb Imager), which will “observe mid- to high-altitude particles. It will allow scientists to understand aerosol sizes and densities, and their effects on clouds and sunlight,” CSA stated.
- SHOW (Spatial Heterodyne Observations of Water), which will “detect water vapour in the upper reaches of the lower atmosphere. Water vapour affects precipitation, clouds, and aerosols. As a greenhouse gas, it drives heating and cooling of the atmosphere.”
- TICFIRE (Thin Ice Cloud in Far InfraRed Experiment), which will “detect water vapour and ice cloud properties. It will also measure the energy that the atmosphere radiates to space, providing better information on how the atmosphere is cooled. TICFIRE will provide the ability to measure this ‘far infrared’ radiation from space, which up until now has not been possible.”
There are numerous recent key BuyandSell.gc.ca procurement vehicles associated with A-CCP. In chronological order, here are the contracts along with a selection of published results.
- January 2014: The Canadian Space Agency issues a contract award valued at nearly $259,000 for a SHOW “assembly and integration” contract for a balloon flight. The December 2013 tender description states the contract will help mature technology “demonstrated successfully in a laboratory environment.” The balloon flight, it added, “will implement the necessary design adjustments to adapt the current SHOW instrument for balloon flight, followed by assembly, integration, and verification of instrument operability.”
- May 2014: Com Dev International, now a part of Honeywell, receives a contract award for a December 2013 technical support services tender to conduct professional services for demonstrating the feasibility of a TICFIRE microsatellite mission. The published contract value was $574,875.
- 2015-16: Preliminary SHOW balloon flight results are published in several papers (here, here and here) in the Optical Society of America’s Technical Digest.
- 2018: A University of Saskatchewan-led study publishes results from the SHOW instrument from NASA’s ER-2 (Earth Resources-2) remote science airplane in the Optical Society of America’s Technical Digest.
- August 2020: The University of Saskatchewan Office of Research Services receives a two-year contract award (until 2022) for “modelling, simulations and scientific analyses” related to A-CCP for the aerosols cloud valued at $980,402. “Initial NASA assessments have indicated that the Canadian instruments … will enhance baseline observations and may be accommodated on A-CCP spacecraft,” the July 2020 tender notice says, adding, “Simulations of measurements to be made by the Canadian instruments are required for each A-CCP satellite architecture” as NASA assesses including the instruments from “technical, scientific and cost perspectives.”
- November 2020: Canada opens a feasibility study for ALI, SHOW and TICFIRE. “With this RFP [request for proposal], the CSA will undertake work by Canadian industry to carefully examine the current instrument concepts, the user and science requirements that were recently established by the Canadian science teams for each of these instruments on the A-CCP mission, the mission constraints imposed by NASA, and technology and design options in order to identify the optimal instrument concept, estimate costs and chart the path to technology readiness. One contract by stream will be awarded,” the tender stated. Three 11-month contracts valued at approximately $574,000 each are awarded in December 2020 to Com Dev (2 contracts) and ABB (1 contract).
- December 2020: The American Geophysical Union’s fall meeting includes two submitted papers describing preliminary A-CCP studies and results, available here and here.
- April 2021 (closing June 22): Canada issues a notice of proposed procurement for “development of far infrared detector and TICFIRE imaging radiometer for high altitude airborne experiments”, for a 30-month contract. The award will be given to the entity with the best overall proposal.
NASA has already announced an Earth System Observatory partnership with the Indian Space Research Organization to unite two different radar systems capable of measuring surface changes of as little as half an inch. Nelson’s alluded-to launch of January 2023 concerns a pathfinder interagency mission called NISAR (NASA-ISRO synthetic aperture radar), which will examine surface changes with an eye to helping with hazard planning and natural resource forecasting.
NASA identified five key areas of interest for the Earth System Observatory: aerosols to better predict global energy balance; clouds (along with associated phenomena such as convection, precipitation and air quality); drought assessment and forecasting; surface biology and geology observations to assist with agriculture and other natural resources; and surface deformation and change associated with earthquakes, landslides, volcanoes, glaciers, groundwater and the Earth’s interior.
The new NASA observatory comes amid growing international calls for addressing global warming. In April, shortly before Nelson’s confirmation as NASA administrator, the World Meteorological Organization released its annual State of the Global Climate that indicates a growing urgency to address global warming.
“This is a frightening report. It needs to be read by all leaders and decision-makers in the world,” António Guterres, United Nations Secretary-General, said in a statement in April. Guterres added that 2021 will be the “make it or break it year” to address anthropogenic climate change, which he said happens through “human activities, human decisions and human folly.”
For its part, Canada’s government announced June 4 it would spend up to $55 million for 58 “community-based climate action initiatives” to help address our country’s larger goal of having net-zero emissions in 2050. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has also been on the offensive in recent months in outlets like Bloomberg, saying his government is doing its utmost to address global warming problems and that Canada will meet its targets.
- More Earth Observation news.