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Silence

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[Gene Feldman] SeaWiFS was launched back in August of 1997.

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and began operating and sending data down in September of

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1997 and lasted until December 11th of 2010.

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So, that's more than a 13 year data set.

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The original idea behind SeaWiFS, which stands for Sea Viewing Wide Field

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Sensor, was to monitor the color of the ocean.  The color

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of the ocean is related to the amount of microscopic plants that live in the ocean

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that have a pigment called chlorophyll, which is

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green.  And the more chlorophyll, more phytoplankton, in the water the

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greener the water, the less the bluer the water. So, we've demonstrated

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that we can actually measure the color of the ocean from space. But what we haven't had

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is a long term record of how ocean color

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and hence, the amount of plants and productivity in the ocean, changes over

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time. And that was the main goal for the SeaWiFS mission.

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Space is a very, very harsh environment. Every

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90 minutes, you go from frigid, frigid cold to very, very

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hot. And, you know, imagine doing that every day

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14 times a day for 13 and a half years, operating

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continuously. The mission was only supposed to last for

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5 years. We lasted actually for over 13.

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But over time things begin to wear out. In

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December what happened was we lost communication with the spacecraft.

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Which is kind of important because what it said was the spacecraft could no longer

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contact Earth and send data down. But more importantly

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we could not contact the spacecraft to try to fix a problem.

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And so finally, in February, it was decided that

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it was hopeless, we were not going to be able to reach the

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spacecraft and the people that operated it, GeoEye,

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declared it lost. Before SeaWiFS,

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ocean color as a measurement was seen as an experimental

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mission, an experimental data set. We never really

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were sure that it was going to give us the kind of information we needed.

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But as a result of SeaWiFS, ocean color as a

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parameter is now one of the key variables that need to get measured by all

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future missions. So, there will be ocean color measurements from this

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point forward. They may not be exactly like

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SeaWiFS, they may present other challenges, but as a

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parameter, ocean color will continue into the future

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and that is solely because of the success of the SeaWiFS mission.