NASA to Brief Media on First Earth Water-Monitoring Satellite Mission

Nov. 10, 2022

An area of the Gulf of Carpentaria on Australia’s northern coast is shown from the International Space Station in September. The SWOT satellite will measure the height of nearly all the water on Earth, including lakes, rivers, reservoirs, and the ocean.

Credit: NASA

The Surface Water and Ocean Topography mission will be the first to observe nearly all water on Earth’s surface, measuring heights of lakes, rivers, reservoirs, and the ocean.

NASA will host a virtual media briefing at 10:30 a.m. EST (7:30 a.m. PST) Nov. 14, at the agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, to discuss the upcoming launch of the Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) satellite.

Scheduled to launch from Vandenberg Space Force Base in central California at 3:46 a.m. PST (6:46 a.m. EST) on Monday, Dec. 12, SWOT will be the first satellite mission to observe nearly all water on Earth’s surface, measuring the height of water in lakes, rivers, reservoirs, as well as the ocean. It is a collaboration between NASA and the French space agency Centre National d’Études Spatiales (CNES), with contributions from the Canadian Space Agency (CSA) and the UK Space Agency.

The briefing will livestream on NASA Television, Facebook and YouTube, as well as the agency’s app and on its website.

Participants will include: