Narrator: It’s a brand new year, with bold new missions.
Last year, NASA’s Earth Expeditions covered the globe,
studying coral reefs, glaciers, air quality,
dust particles, plankton, greenhouse gases, and the changing Arctic.
This year three new missions join the effort to study
our home planet. The HyspIRI mission will fly out of Hawaii,
measuring volcanic gas emissions and coral reef health.
The PACE mission will cover the Pacific, studying tiny plants in the ocean called
phytoplankton and their impact on the marine carbon cycle.
And the SnowEx mission kicks off in Colorado to determine how much
water is stored in Earth’s snow-covered regions.
These field experiments will complement NASA satellite data,
help answer some of our most pressing questions about how our planet is changing.