Terra – Climate Research Orbiter

Terra is the EOS Flagship – Climate Research Orbiter. It will observe Earth’s surface from space and reveal how the world is changing in all physical aspects, enabling us to understand how to maintain the balance of our global climate.

Mission Objective

Terra collects data from all our land types—covering everything from deserts to ice sheets—to fulfill its mission to explore the connections between multiple systems of our planet. This is the connection between Earth’s atmosphere, land types, and the maintenance of the energy balance.

Mission Significance

The mission allows a greater understanding of climate change and its long-term effects on human activity and natural disasters.

Source: NASA

Engineering Challenges

Terra hosts a range of instruments covering a broad spectral spectrum. Integrating this complex payload required exceptionally high optical alignment and mechanical sturdiness. Each instrument must deliver high radiometric accuracy despite challenging harsh space environment conditions. For example, varying illumination, thermal cycling, and internal blackbody radiation. Ensuring consistent emissivity, minimizing stray light across wide fields of view, and maintaining detector sensitivity for many years presented significant engineering challenges.

Mission Components

Terra’s payload contains five remote sensors. All of them are designed to monitor the state of Earth’s climate:

Acktar’s Solution

To support Aqua’s instrument set, Acktar provided black coating technologies, including 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 maintaing thermal stability.

Source: NASA

Impact

During the 20 years of Terra in orbit, technology has changed and evolved several times, and the data it provides has changed how we understand our planet. Here are some of its great contributions to our plant in general and its health in particular:

Cleaner Air – Healthier Air:

Using the data obtained by MODIS and MISR providing spectroradiometer imaging and views of airborne particles, it was possible to track pollutants through the atmosphere. In addition, the data also enabled the forecast of days with poor air quality. It was found that the air quality is improving in many areas worldwide – which means we can be much more confident to breathe deeper.

Greener Planet – Healthier Planet:

The health of our plants is crucial for the health of mankind as well. Terra’s daily coverage of measuring Earth’s greenness by ASTER and MODIS significantly changed the monitoring method of our global vegetation.

Terra’s grand 20-year legacy of Earth’s observation will continue contributing to science in general and the research of our planet’s systems for many years ahead.

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 ACKTAR PARTS: