NASA Selects Launch Services for Global Surface Water Survey Mission

NASA has chosen Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) of Hawthorne, California, to give dispatch administrations to the organization’s Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) mission. Dispatch is focused for April 2021 on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Space Launch Complex 4E at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. The aggregate cost for NASA to dispatch SWOT is roughly $112 million, which incorporates the dispatch benefit; rocket preparing; payload combination; and following, information and telemetry bolster. Intended to make the principal ever worldwide study of Earth’s surface water, notwithstanding high-determination sea estimations, the SWOT mission will gather point by point estimations of how water bodies on Earth change after some time. The satellite will review no less than 90 percent of the globe, concentrate Earth’s lakes, waterways, repositories and seas, at any rate twice at regular intervals, help in freshwater administration around the globe, to enhance sea flow models and climate and atmosphere forecasts. The SWOT shuttle will be together created and oversaw by NASA and the French space organization Center National d’Etudes Spatiales (CNES). NASA’s Launch Services Program at Kennedy Space Center in Florida will deal with the SpaceX dispatch benefit. The SWOT Project office at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, oversees rocket improvement for the organization’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington.