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CNN Saturday Morning News
Interview With David Adamec
Aired July 13, 2002 - 07:14 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
MILES O'BRIEN, CNN ANCHOR: All right, quick, a little quiz for you. Can you name some of the biggest advantages derived from sending spacecraft into orbit?
Well, Tang, of course, Velcro, spacesuit sticks (ph) are some of the spillover effects that have come into daily life that have helped us all out, thanks to our space program.
But those are a little bit more inconsequential than the next thing we're going to talk about. Jacqui Jeras is joining me. Jacqui is a person who knows a lot about satellites and a lot about computers. How many computers do you have up in that weather center, 18, 20?
JACQUI JERAS, CNN METEOROLOGIST: Oh, quite a few.
O'BRIEN: And in the course of a day, how many satellites do you use?
JERAS: How many satellites?
O'BRIEN: Yes, do you know?
JERAS: Usually just two.
O'BRIEN: Just two, the GO satellites, right?
JERAS: Yes, the GO satellites...
O'BRIEN: The big weather satellites.
JERAS: ... usually visual imagery and infrared imagery.
O'BRIEN: And those are up at about 22,000 miles.
JERAS: Right.
O'BRIEN: And they look down upon us. But NASA has a couple of others that are kind of interesting. Jacqui's going to tell us about it, right?
JERAS: That's right, Miles.
And whatever on earth is the news, whether it be flooding in Texas, fires in Arizona, or even melting icebergs in Antarctica, you can bet that NASA is watching that from space, thanks to satellites, like we were talking about.
And this one that you see, called AQUA (ph). Now, it's also -- AQUA is one of many that are taking pictures of the earth from high above. And the images captured help meteorologists to understand factors that contribute to floods and hurricanes and other major weather events.
And to help us explain exactly what we're going to be looking at here is David Adamec, and he is joining us from NASA this morning.
David, good morning.
DAVID ADAMEC, NASA OCEANOGRAPHER: Good morning.
JERAS: Thanks for getting up early with us.
ADAMEC: Oh, no problem.
JERAS: First of all, I want to ask you, how are these new images and satellites like AQUA different from the satellites that we use to show the clouds, for example, on our weather maps?
ADAMEC: Well, AQUA and its sister ship TERA (ph) are -- represent new technology for NASA. They've been in development over the past 15 years, and like everything else, with technology advancing, the satellites themselves have gotten better.
And they're able to take, you know, higher-resolution pictures of what's going on on the earth, and it helps us understand even more the intricacies of the dynamics and physics we have to know about so that we can understand exactly what's shaping our environment.
JERAS: And we've been looking at some very incredible satellite pictures of the past couple of weeks of some very recent events, and I want to start out with the flooding that took place in central Texas about a week ago. And we have images to show what it looked like before and after.
And if we could go ahead and take a look at some of those images right now and pull those up, and David, if you could kind of walk us through these and tell us exactly what it is that we're looking at.
This one, though, you can see there across the Big Bend area, June 24.
ADAMEC: Right, this is from the Modus (ph) instrument on the TERA spacecraft, looking down at Texas before the heavy rains hit the southern parts of Texas. And later, as you know, the thunderstorms just kept on rumbling through. And you'll see a great difference, especially in the water tables, rivers that are really not that visible in this image later on you'll see swollen three or four times their normal -- normal across their banks. And it's very easy to pick up the big change that occurred as a result of the feet of water that fell in Texas. As you can see, all of a sudden those...
JERAS: There we go, there's the new one.
ADAMEC: Yes, those rivers are incredibly wider and much more prominent in this picture. And this particular instrument will get a picture about once a day over the same area, so it's, you know, will help people monitor, because the resolution is so good on these images, exactly where the water is, even in the remotest of areas where people can't go.
JERAS: So are you using this to forecast rising river levels? Are we watching it for recession of the rivers, or what?
ADAMEC: Right now, the data itself is just being used for monitoring. But that is new to us as well, and we're trying to learn how to take in as much data so that, you know, we can include it into things like forecast models so that we'll actually be better able to serve people who need that information.
JERAS: Excellent. Also, the wildfires that have been going on into California, through New Mexico, Colorado, and Arizona, that has been a big deal, and very visible on the satellite pictures as well. And we want to start out by now taking a look at a few of those satellite pictures.
And if you can walk us though the next ones here, we could take a look at, I believe, from Arizona is what we have? If we could take a look at those?
ADAMEC: OK...
JERAS: There we go.
ADAMEC: OK, yes, we're going to zoom down into Arizona. This was actually an unplanned use of the satellite itself when it was originally planned, and you can just watch these fires emerge.
JERAS: Wow.
ADAMEC: That's the Rodeo-Chediski fires. And you can see how they merge. Again, very important to get this kind of view from space, the safe haven of space, because a lot of that terrain is very rugged. It's difficult to get observers down there. And you can keep a monitoring watch on that fire as it's going on from the safety of space, at least, and hopefully get that information, again, back to the people who have to use it.
JERAS: Right, and it's actually really dangerous for airplanes or helicopters to be up in that type of an area as well, so this is really beneficial.
ADAMEC: Right, for anybody, as I said. And it provides a nice global view. And you do get it at least once a day with these particular instruments. JERAS: Hey, David, the smoke flow is very obvious on those satellite pictures. But can they be used after the fact to look at the charred areas?
ADAMEC: Oh, oh, sure. I mean, that's a very important part. I mean, while the fire is going on, of course, is when the most danger is, but then again, you have to plan for recovery and allocate your resources for recovery. And again, I think we're going to go in and look at different parts. We're going to look at that Chediski fires again.
ADAMEC: You -- you're able to see the parts of the land that are scarred there very easily just off to the side there. There's a really good image of the scarring of the land.
JERAS: Right.
ADAMEC: And you have a better idea of exactly, you know, if there happen to be agriculture in that area, you know, what type of resources might be allocated, then, to how large an area you really have to worry about.
JERAS: OK. We want to bring Miles O'Brien in with us here as well. Miles, I know this is a big interest of you.
O'BRIEN: Well, you know-
JERAS: And you study (UNINTELLIGIBLE) as well.
O'BRIEN: ... kind of hard for me to stay out of it, (UNINTELLIGIBLE).
JERAS: I know, so come on and jump in here.
O'BRIEN: Good morning to you, David.
ADAMEC: Good morning.
O'BRIEN: As a fellow space cadet, I am -- I'm a little curious. What if you sent, like, an -- the equivalent of AQUA and TERA technology to Mars, what would you find out? Or does that -- do the current orbiter there, Odyssey, does it have just as much capability and technology?
ADAMEC: Well, well, it certainly has different capability. The actual TERA and AQUA platforms are about the size of a school bus, and so they're rather large. And it's kind of tough to get something that big to Mars right now. The propulsion system would be absolutely incredible to do that.
O'BRIEN: So you need, you need a much bigger package than you can reasonably launch toward Mars right now?
ADAMEC: Let's just say that they're -- launching toward Mars right now, yes. It's a much bigger package. There's a suite of instruments on these satellites that look at the earth, you know, not only with the way we saw there, in visible imagery, but at all different flavors of light, looking at the microwaves and the infrared so we can get information about the temperatures, about the moisture, about the vegetation, and things like that.
So there's a lot of instruments on that one platform, whereas when you send to the extrasolar probes out, or out to different planets, the instrument package is usually a little bit smaller, and the capability as far as the resolution, you know, it'll take pictures 10 miles across, whereas the instruments you just saw are looking at about a couple football fields across.
O'BRIEN: It occurs to me, Jacqui -- is Jacqui there still?
JERAS: Yes, I'm still here.
O'BRIEN: I think the only way to truly find out about this is to send a meteorologist to Mars. You want to go?
JERAS: (UNINTELLIGIBLE)?
O'BRIEN: You want to go?
ADAMEC: We're going to sign her up.
O'BRIEN: Are you ready?
JERAS: Sign me up.
O'BRIEN: Sign her up.
JERAS: I'll go.
O'BRIEN: All right, well, that was fun. Thanks, guys.
ADAMEC: Thank you.
O'BRIEN: Thank you, David.
JERAS: Thank you, Miles.
O'BRIEN: Thank you, Jacqui Jeras.
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