At an awards ceremony May 16, 2003, Geography Professor Catherine Gautier and fellow researcher Shiren Yang were given a Goddard Space Flight Center Teamwork Award. All 1,538 members of the Aqua Team received this award. Aqua Project Scientist Claire Parkinson, who sent the awards to Gautier and Yang, explained in an email Susanna Baumgart in July:
- “Gautier was an automatic recipient because of being on the AIRS Science Team, and Yang was included because of being an important assistant in Catherine’s AIRS Team efforts. Goddard Teamwork awards are given annually, but this is the first time that the Aqua Team won. It’s also extremely unusual to have such a huge team listed. In the case of Aqua, we opted to nominate as a group everyone on all the science teams, plus the key people in the companies building the instruments and the spacecraft, etc.”
According to the Goddard Space Flight Center’s Annual Honor and Awards of Excellence Nomination Form, the teamwork award is for: ” Evidence that the team made a significant, extraordinary contribution to the Center’s mission while maximizing the use of its resources and the capabilities of all team members in achieving its goals.”
AIRS, the part of the Aqua project that Gautier and Yang worked on, is a high-resolution infrared sounder that flies on the Aqua satellite with two microwave sounders. Measurements from the three instruments analyzed jointly allow scientists to filter out the effects of clouds on the infrared data, providing more accurate air- and surface-temperature profiles.
NASA’s Aqua webpage explains the Aqua project’s mission:
- “Aqua, Latin for water, is a NASA Earth Science satellite mission named for the large amount of information that the mission will be collecting about the Earth’s water cycle, including evaporation from the oceans, water vapor in the atmosphere, clouds, precipitation, soil moisture, sea ice, land ice, and snow cover on the land and ice. Additional variables also being measured by Aqua include radiative energy fluxes, aerosols, vegetation cover on the land, phytoplankton and dissolved organic matter in the oceans, and air, land, and water temperatures. The Aqua mission is a part of the NASA-centered international Earth Observing System (EOS).”
SpaceDaily printed an article June 4, 2003, summarizing Aqua’s first year of work. The following text is excerpted from the article:
- “Aqua was launched on May 4, 2002, and soon after began providing valuable information from its massive data flow, approximately 89 gigabytes a day, allowing scientists to analyze and generate dozens of data products. The Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS), the Advanced Microwave Sounding Unit (AMSU) and the Humidity Sounder for Brazil (HSB) … [are three of the Aqua instruments that capture an ongoing, detailed picture of the Earth’s atmosphere.]
- “Aqua is the latest in a series of the Earth Observing System spacecraft, following the Terra satellite launched in December 1999…. Aqua crosses the equator 28-30 times a day, doing so at 1:30 p.m. as it heads north and at 1:30 a.m. as it heads south. The observation times contrast with the Terra satellite, which crosses the equator between 10:30 and 10:45 a.m. going south and between 10:30 and 10:45 p.m. going north. The combination of data from these two missions provides important insights into the daily variations of key scientific parameters such as snow coverage and ocean color.
- “Aqua is an international partnership between the United States, Japan and Brazil. During its six-year mission, Aqua will collect data … [that] will help scientists better understand how global ecosystems change, and how they respond to and affect global environmental change.”
