Earth

Soil Moisture Mapper Antenna Deploys

Feb. 26, 2015

The Soil Moisture Active Passive mission will track soil moisture and the freeze-thaw state of the ground worldwide. The mission will help improve climate and weather forecasts and allow scientists to monitor droughts and better predict flooding caused by severe rainfall or snowmelt -- information that can save lives and property. In addition, since plant growth depends on the amount of water in the soil, SMAP data will allow nations to better forecast crop yields and assist in global famine early-warning systems.

Transcript

All conversations/dialogue takes place via headset and is difficult to identify speaker unless seen speaking on camera.

Nav go.

Great chief.

Project Management?

Go.

All stations (unintelligible) deploy, (unintelligible) deploy (unintelligible), on my mark. 3, 2, 1, mark.

Nominal post-bloom telemetry observed. Everything looking good.

(applause)

Thank you. Once we cross 93,000 in two steps, we will enable success criterion. We should reach completion around 97,300 steps if everything goes per predicts.

We've got about one more minute. OK, we're seeing the high tension switch indication right now.

Stand by.

(unitelliible)

Go.

We are in point (unintelligible) and we're in rate matching portion of our turn.

Excellent.

FP reporting. We're now in (unintelligible) stand by.

Great, thank you.

Deploy's completed. Deploy activity is completed. We're back on the (unintelligible) and uh, we'll be looking at the data.

Applause.

We worked for six years to get to this point. It went uh, appeared to go just wonderfully well, and uh congratulations everyone.

Major milestone for the project. Thank you.

Thank you sir.

Applause.