NASA is about to announce its next generation of Earth-observing satellites. As soon as this month, it will lay out preliminary plans for a multibillion-dollar set of missions that will launch later this decade. This “Earth system observatory,” as NASA calls it, will offer insights into two long-standing wild cards of climate change—clouds and aerosols—while providing new details about the temperatures and chemistry of the planet’s changing surface. The satellite fleets also mark a revival for NASA’s earth science, which has languished over the past decade compared with exploration of Mars and other planets.
Although officials have been planning the missions for several years, the Biden administration is accelerating them as part of its focus on addressing climate change. “Earth system science is poised to make an enormous difference in our ability to mitigate, adapt to, and plan for changes we’re seeing,” says Karen St. Germain, director of NASA’s earth science division. “The pace we’re going to have to do that is much higher in the decade in front of us than the decade behind us.”