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A tiny Nasa satellite was launched last month from New Zealand. Its mission is to improve climate change prediction by measuring heat escaping from Earth’s poles.
“This new information ... will improve our ability to model what’s happening in the poles, what’s happening in climate,” Nasa’s earth sciences research director Karen St Germain said.
The satellite is the size of a shoebox. It lifted off from Mahia in northern New Zealand.
The overall mission is called Prefire. With Prefire, Nasa aims to understand how clouds, humidity or the melting of ice into water affects heat loss from the poles.
Small satellites like this one are a low-cost way to answer very specific scientific questions, said St Germain.
Larger satellites could be thought of as “generalists” and the small ones as “specialists”, she added.
