Aura – EOS Mission

As part of the EOS mission, Aura focuses on the atmosphere by monitoring air quality, ozone, and climate interactions.

Mission Objective

Aura is a scientific research satellite that studies our planet’s atmospheric characteristics by conducting measurements of ozone, aerosols, air quality, etc.

Mission Significance

The data allows science to achieve groundbreaking insights about the atmosphere’s chemistry. Moreover, the planet’s climate is highly affected by changes in the composition of our atmosphere. Therefore, its investigation is important to our understanding of the climate.

Source: NASA

Engineering Challenges

Aura carries several advanced atmospheric instruments. Integrating these diverse sensors onto a single spacecraft is highly demanding technologically.

First, it has to maintain strict thermal stability and protection against stray reflections. Also, the instruments need to withstand high radiation exposure and the risk of contamination, since these factors reduce detector sensitivity and distort calibration. Additional requirements, such as high radiometric accuracy and mechanical stability under launch loads, must be met to ensure the satellite’s overall function.

Mission Components

Terra’s payload contains four instruments, three of which are still operating. All of them are designed for conducting daily observations of several key parameters of our climate on a global scale.

Microwave Limb Sounder (MLS): measures ozone emissions to provide detailed vertical profiles. Its main objectives are to enhance understanding of ozone depletion, climate change, tropospheric ozone, and the effects of volcanic activity.

High-Resolution Dynamics Limb Sounder (HIRDLS): Measures infrared radiation from ozone, greenhouse gases, and trace gases across the atmosphere. Observations aim to map the global distribution of temperature and trace gases within the atmosphere.

Ozone Monitoring Instrument (OMI): Uses UV and visible radiation to create maps, enabling monitoring of the recovery of the ozone layer. Achieves this by measuring all types of aerosols and assessing cloud pressure and coverage.

Tropospheric Emission Spectrometer (TES): TES has been inactive since 2018. It is used to measure infrared radiation from lower ozone layers and other greenhouse gases. Its main mission was to improve the understanding of troposphere-stratosphere exchange and the impact of these properties on global radiative balance and atmospheric dynamics.

Acktar’s Solution

To support the high radiometric and thermal requirements of Aura’s atmospheric instruments, Acktar provided low reflectance black coating technologies such as Magic Black and Fractal Black. Those are applied on the satellite instrument to ensure an accurate data transmission and the instrument’s durability for years by maintaining thermal stability.

Source: NASA

Impact

Throughout Aura’s almost 20 years of impressive career, it has made tremendous contributions to the understanding of the composition of the atmosphere and how it affects our climate. Here are some examples of interesting discoveries:

Uncovering new clouds – Aura has found unknown types of clouds in the upper atmosphere, which might influence our climate.
Revealing the chemistry of the ozone layer – Aura detected the chemical components of the Ozone layer all over the globe and its changes during the year. This data is helpful in understanding the two main roles of the ozone layer, which are the protection from solar radiation and atmosphere heating due to being a greenhouse gas.

Aura has been performing quite well on its long journey around our planet. According to scientific predictions, the lack of power generation will limit Aura’s lifespan to mid-2026. Although the spacecraft drifts constantly, the mission is anticipated to continue delivering valuable scientific data until the end of its operation.

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