NASA will bring ocean wind tracking device to ISS

The US Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) announced on January 29 that it will bring the ISS-Rapid Scat to the International Space Station in 2014 to measure the wind speed and determine the wind direction on the surface of the oceans. .

The ISS-RapidScat device will help improve the weather forecasting problem by better monitoring storms and allowing a clear understanding of the interaction between the ocean-atmosphere and Earth's climate.

The device also provides missing data when the QuikScat device with the same features as ISS-RapidScat installed 2 years ago stopped working only 10 months after being posted to space. Therefore, the necessary ocean wind data has not been updated since late 2009.

NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Commission have studied alternative devices for QuikScat. To solve the budget problem cut by the budget for this study, NASA has proposed fixing the hardware of QuikScat and incorporating new hardware.

ISS-RapidScat will have a mechanism similar to QuikScat, covering all areas of the Earth that it can access from the orbit of the ISS station. ISS-RapidScat will be posted on ISS by SpaceX Dragon, and the device has an expected life of 2 years.