Nov Is Native American History Month

NASA's AQUA Spacecraft Wins Popular Science's Best of What's New Award for 2002

Artistic image of AQUA spacecraft in space

NASA's Aqua spacecraft was chosen by Popular Science as one of the best innovations in aviation and space. The winners will appear in the annual Best of What's New issue coming out in December.

"Aqua and its six Earth-observing instruments are doing spectacularly well, and it's a terrific extra bonus to have a magazine like Popular Science recognize this and award Aqua one of its Best of What's New awards," said Dr. Claire Parkinson, Aqua Project Scientist from Goddard.

Each year, Popular Science reviews thousands of new products and innovations and chooses only 100 winners for 10 different categories. To win, a product or technology must represent a significant step forward in their category.

Aqua is the latest in a series of Earth Observing System (EOS) spacecraft dedicated to advancing our understanding of global climate and global change. A central role of Aqua, as the name implies, is to gather information about water in the Earth's system, although Aqua is also gathering information about other Earth variables as well.

Aqua is a joint project among the United States, Japan and Brazil. The spacecraft and four of the instruments were provided by NASA. Goddard provided the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) and the Advanced Microwave Sounding Unit (AMSU) instruments, and managed the integration and testing of the spacecraft. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory provided the Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS) instrument, and the Clouds and the Earth's Radiant Energy System (CERES) instrument was provided by NASA's Langley Research Center.

Overall management of the Aqua mission is located at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. Goddard manages the Earth Observing System for NASA's Earth Science Enterprise in Washington, D.C. Aqua was built by TRW, under contract with NASA, and the MODIS, AMSU, AIRS, CERES, AMSR-E, and HSB instruments were built by Raytheon, Northrup Grumman, BAE Systems, TRW, Mitsubishi Electric, and Matra-Marconi, respectively.

For more information on Aqua, visit http://aqua.nasa.gov
For more information on the award visit: http://www.popsci.com

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NASA 's Mission:
*To understand and protect our home planet
*To explore the Universe and search for life
*To inspire the next generation of explorers
…as only NASA can

For a further details of the NASA mission, go to: http://www.nasa.gov/bios/vision.html

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In observance and in celebration of reaching a century of flight in 2003, Goddard News will feature historical NASA flight tidbits.

This week in history: : Nov 12, 1981 marked the second space shuttle flight, STS-2. This mission's objective was to demonstrate safe re-launch and safe return of the orbiter and crew and to verify the combined performance of the entire shuttle vehicle - orbiter, solid rocket boosters and external tank.
For more on STS-2, visit: http://www-pao.
ksc.nasa.gov/kscpao/shuttle/
missions/sts-2/mission-sts-2.html