After a Decade, NASA's Topex/Poseidon Adventure Sails On Thanks to Wallops Team

Wallops TOPEX Team (left to right) Dennis Lockwood, George Hayne, Jeff Lee, Craig Purdy, Larry Rossi, Carol Purdy, Art Grothouse, Ann McDowell, Anita Brenner, David Hancock, Lisa Brittingham, Annette Conger, Hayden Gordon, Peggy Jester and Barton Bull. Absent: Ron Brooks, Ron Forsythe and Norm Schultz.

It's been sailing the blackness of space for a decade: a silent sentinel, watching over the world's oceans, looking for signs of the mysterious El Nino and La Nina phenomena.

TOPEX/Poseidon, a joint NASA-French Space Agency mission to study ocean circulation and its effect on climate, recently passed the 10-year mark.

Some 46,763 orbits after launch, the spacecraft, designed to fly three to five years, continues to precisely map the surface height of 95 percent of Earth's ice-free oceans every 10 days. In doing so, it has revolutionized the study of Earth's oceans.

Support systems on board the spacecraft are healthy, and the TOPEX altimeter is continuing to collect data with unprecedented precision, and a Wallops team is largely responsible for its success.

Wallops personnel developed the specifications for the TOPEX altimeter, monitored assembly by the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, extensively analyzed its pre-launch testing performance, developed all its data correction algorithms and have continued to monitor its day-to-day- performance in space. The Wallops team also has the responsibility for recovery commanding from anomalous conditions and for the ongoing data calibration.

Its continuous data on sea surface height, wind speed and wave height have given us a new understanding of how ocean circulation affects climate. The satellite provides input for long-term climate forecasting and prediction models.

TOPEX/Poseidon produced the first global views of seasonal current changes. It maps year-to-year changes in upper-ocean heat storage. The satellite has improved our understanding of tides, producing the world's most precise global tidal maps and demystifying deep-ocean tides and their effect on ocean circulation.

TOPEX/Poseidon monitors global mean sea-level changes, an effective indicator of the consequence of global temperature change. Its data are input into atmospheric models for forecasting hurricane seasons and individual storm severity. And the satellite has improved our knowledge of Earth's gravity field.

For further information on the TOPEX/Poseidon mission visit:
http://topex.wff.nasa.gov/