File:State of NASA - June 2, 2021 - by Bill Nelson.jpg

The State of NASA

Speech by the new NASA Administrator, former Florida Senator Bill Nelson

June 2, 2021

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0h6LULBZi_0

New 'Earth System Observatory' Announced

Expanding on NASA's original mission statement and decades of earth science programs

Measuring and monitoring the vital signs of the home planet

The agency is expanding its mission to tackle climate change. The plan is to launch five satellites over the next eight years that will enable the observatory to analyze everything from aerosols in the atmosphere to the rise of sea levels.

“All of this data over the next 10 years, when these five observatories are put up, is going to give us a picture of our planet and our climate to understand the changes that are happening,” Nelson said.

• https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/new-nasa-earth-system-observatory-to-help-address-mitigate-climate-change

“When you look out the window of a spacecraft, it really gives you a different perspective,” Nelson said in an interview.

NASA is now going to take a closer look at what’s happening here on Earth, by studying how the climate is changing.

It’s a mission that is personal for Nelson, a former U.S. Senator and astronaut who flew on the space shuttle Columbia 35 years ago.

“I was seeing how we were messing up our planet, and that made me much more sensitive — to want to be a good steward of our climate."

• https://www.mynews13.com/fl/orlando/news/2021/05/26/nasa-expanding-mission-to-studying-climate-change-on-earth

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The White House announced the Earth System Observatory program in a fact sheet that outlined a broader program to monitor and address the impacts of climate change, including $1 billion in “pre-disaster mitigation resources” for communities provided by the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

“NASA’s Earth System Observatory will be a new architecture of advanced spaceborne Earth observation systems, providing the world with an unprecedented understanding of the critical interactions between Earth’s atmosphere, land, ocean, and ice processes,” the White House said of the new program. “These processes determine how the changing climate will play out at regional and local levels, on near and long-term time scales.”

• https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2021/05/24/fact-sheet-biden-administration-invests-1-billion-to-protect-communities-families-and-businesses-before-disaster-strikes/

NASA, in a separate statement, said the Earth System Observatory will be a set of missions addressing the “designated observables,” a set of key observations that scientists recommended the agency pursue in the Earth science decadal survey published in early 2018.

• https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/new-nasa-earth-system-observatory-to-help-address-mitigate-climate-change

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