A Mission to Better Understand Earth’s Polar Regions (Mission Overview)

NASA’s PREFIRE mission aims to improve global climate change predictions by expanding our understanding of heat loss at the polar regions. The Polar Radiant Energy in the Far-InfraRed Experiment (PREFIRE) will send two shoebox-size satellites into space to study the Arctic and Antarctic. They’ll be the first to systematically measure heat in the form of far-infrared radiation emitted from those regions.

Earth absorbs much of the Sun’s energy at the tropics. Weather and ocean currents then move that heat toward the poles, which help regulate Earth’s climate by radiating that heat back into space. But the Arctic is warming about three times faster than anywhere else on Earth, and that’s leading to increased ice sheet melt and sea level rise in coastal communities. The data from PREFIRE will help scientists better understand how Earth’s polar regions respond to climate change and what that might mean for the future.

For more information: https://science.nasa.gov/mission/prefire

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Wisconsin