Quick Scatterometer
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Disaster Management: Rapid Dry-Up of Rainwater on Land Surface Leading to the Santa Barbara Wildfire
Wildfires are a recurring natural hazard faced by Californians. In Santa Barbara County, a wildfire, called the Jesusita fire, ignited on May 5, 2009 in the Cathedral Peak area northwest of Mission Canyon.
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Hurricane Katrina
Nearly the whole of the Gulf of Mexico was churning with the powerful winds and rains of Hurricane Katrina on August 28, 2005, when NASA's QuikScat satellite captured this image.
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SeaWinds Watches for Breakup of Giant Iceberg
NASA's QuikScat satellite instrument kept an eye on an iceberg the size of Rhode Island, the first time this space technology had been used to track a potential threat to international shipping.
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Mission Summary
The Quick Scatterometer, or QuikScat, is an Earth satellite designed to provide valuable data on ocean winds that revolutionized environmental predictions and weather forecasting. Designed as a speedy replacement for the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency's Advanced Earth Observing Satellite-1 and its NASA Scatterometer instrument, QuikScat was conceived, developed and launched in less than two years. The satellite is part of NASA's Earth Observing System monitoring global climate change and was designed as a two-year mission, but spent 10 years in operation until it stopped collecting wind data in 2009 due to an age-related failure of a mechanism that spins the scatterometer antenna.
The data QuikScat collected has become such an intrinsic piece of weather predictions, including hurricane monitoring, that NASA has quickly begun preparations to launch a replacement instrument to the International Space Station in 2014. The new instrument, called ISS-RapidScat, was conceived with hardware originally built to test parts of QuikScat to allow the agency to cost-effectively and quickly put the replacement instrument in orbit.
Scientific Instrument(s)
- Active radar scatterometer (SeaWinds)
