This is Delta Launch Control at T-64 minutes and counting. I'm privileged to have with me now Steve Volz,
who is the CloudSat/CALIPSO program executive from NASA Headquarters. Steve, thanks for joining us this morning.
Thanks for having me. It's a great time to be here, that's for sure.
Yes, it is. And we hope to have a good launch today to show everybody.
But tell us a little bit about the international partnership that we have developed on, in processing this mission.
Well, this mission, actually it's two missions, the CloudSat and CALIPSO missions,
and each of them has a, a unique contribution and a necessary contribution from international partners.
The CALIPSO mission is the second of some that we've had with the French Space Agency, CNES.
They contributed not only the spacecraft and one of the three instruments, but also all of the spacecraft operations during the
three-year lifetime of the mission. So we're actually tied in with the Toulouse Space Center in France right now on voiceline,
and they're going to be doing the spacecraft operations from the start, from the get-go here.
Great. And on the CloudSat side, the Canadian Space Agency, CSA, contributed a key element of the cloud-profiling radar.
Really the necessary element, component to make this thing, to make the CloudSat instrument work.
So both of these have been necessary and very, very critical contributions to the two missions.
And I assume that because of this partnership that we've established that there's
some follow-up relationships that we're going to be having with them in the future?
That's true. The, we already have in the works a second, another collaboration with CNES, the Jason-2, as they call it, or the OSTM,
Ocean Surface Topology Mission, Topography Mission that we have working, in the works for a launch in 2008. And this is actually the second.
We had Jason, which was another one with CNES. This is one of a series of several missions we've had with CNES where we share
common interests, obviously, in, in doing this Earth science research and contributing, you get much better results out of our satellites.
And the information, the data that we're getting back from both of these flights,
we're going to be sharing it with, with those that are involved.
These are, these are exploratory missions. Part of the Earth Systems Science Pathfinder Program out of NASA's Earth science program.
So one of the benefits that is, you know, we're not quite sure all the great things that we're going to get out of it,
but we already have in the pipeline, CloudSat in particular, for near real-time directed transfer the
data to some possible operational users. The Air Force is certainly interested in the data that we get from CloudSat with,
we're going to be delivering it with a three- to five-hour latency. And unusual for an exploratory mission like CloudSat.
CALIPSO is a little bit longer time between when we take the data to when we distribute it, but they're, we've got a,
a nice framework set up for the, for sharing it with the community and to get the data distributed as
much as possible so we get the greatest use from all the potential users out there.
Okay. And of course, these missions have been in the planning stages for quite some time,
so I'm sure everybody's eager to see, see it get on orbit.
Eager's not quite the word. Frantic, almost. Yes. These have been, these were a response to a 1998 announcement of opportunity.
These were peer-selected missions that were -- competitive selected, I should have said --
from the community of amongst a wide range of very good proposals. And the science community is ready,
willing and eager to use the data as soon as we can get it to them.
Great. Well, we're just about 61 minutes away from launch, so...I know there's still a lot of work to be done, and,
and we've got a lot of coordination still yet to be done over this next hour and a half before,
before we launch. So good luck to, to you and the rest of the team, and we'll, we'll see a good launch this morning.
We certainly expect to.
Alright. Thank you, Bruce.
Thank you. Again, we are at T-60 minutes and counting. About 90 minutes away from launch.
At T-60 minutes and counting, this is Delta Launch Control.