Speaker 1: Welcome to Bedtime Astronomy. Explore the wonders of the cosmos
Speaker 1: with our soothing Bedtime Astronomie podcast. Each episode offers a
Speaker 1: gentle journey through the stars, planets, and beyond, perfect for
Speaker 1: unwinding after a long day. Let's travel through the mysteries
Speaker 1: of the universe as you drift off into a peaceful
Speaker 1: slumber under.
Speaker 2: The night sky. Imagine just for a second that you
Speaker 2: are looking out your window at this towering thunderstorm right
Speaker 2: the sky. Is that bruised purple color, you know, the
Speaker 2: lightning is just strobing, and you deep down it's about
Speaker 2: to drop a completely catastrophic flash flood right on your city.
Speaker 3: It's a terrifying scenario, Yeah.
Speaker 2: It is. But hey, so what if I told you
Speaker 2: that to predict exactly when that specific storm will turn deadly,
Speaker 2: you you actually shouldn't be looking at the rain falling
Speaker 2: out of the bottom exactly, And you shouldn't be looking
Speaker 2: at those massive, you know, anvilsh shaped clouds at the
Speaker 2: very top either. No, you really shouldn't, right, because to
Speaker 2: truly understand the destructive power of that storm, you actually
Speaker 2: need to look directly into this invitable vertical elevator shaft
Speaker 2: in the exact middle of.
Speaker 3: It, which is frankly the ultimate blind spot in modern
Speaker 3: meteorology right now. I mean, we see the aftermath and
Speaker 3: we see the exhaust, but the engine itself has been
Speaker 3: essentially hidden from view for decades.
Speaker 2: And that is exactly what we are unpacking today because
Speaker 2: we are looking at this profound, honestly almost unsettling contradiction
Speaker 2: in how our entire planet operates. It really is a paradox, right,
Speaker 2: because on one hand, you have the absolute most fundamental
Speaker 2: thing you need to survive, which is water. Yeah, more
Speaker 2: than half of the entire world's life supporting fresh water.
Speaker 2: I mean the water that fills the reservoirs you drink from,
Speaker 2: the water that grows the food on your table, the
Speaker 2: system that essentially keeps human civilization humming. It all comes
Speaker 2: from tropical convective storms.
Speaker 3: It's basically the delivery mechanism for life on Earth exactly.
Speaker 3: I mean, without that massive global transport of moisture, the
Speaker 3: planet as we know it simply doesn't function. We would
Speaker 3: be in serious trouble.
Speaker 2: But then you have the dark side of that exact
Speaker 2: same coin, Yeah, the destruction, right, because these storms, these
Speaker 2: literal engines of life are also responsible for some of
Speaker 2: the most extreme, terrifying, and just life threatening weather events
Speaker 2: on Earth because devastating floods, they generate hail that destroys
Speaker 2: entire crops and minutes, they spawn tornadoes, they wipe out power.
Speaker 3: Grizz It's a massive, massive paradox.
Speaker 2: It is how can something so incredibly vital to your
Speaker 2: everyday survival also be so inherently destructive?
Speaker 3: And honestly, that duality is exactly why atmospheric scientists have
Speaker 3: been so relentlessly obsessed with them for so long. Right,
Speaker 3: we are completely reliant on this massive system that we
Speaker 3: just don't fully understand, and well more importantly, it's a
Speaker 3: system we can't perfectly predict.
Speaker 2: Which is the scary part from most people, right exactly.
Speaker 3: I mean, we know they bring the water, we know
Speaker 3: they bring the danger, But the precise actual physical mechanics
Speaker 3: of how a storm decides in real time to be
Speaker 3: just a gentle afternoon rain maker versus a catastrophic, multi
Speaker 3: billion dollar event. Yeah, that exact tipping point has just
Speaker 3: been completely obscured.
Speaker 2: From us, which is why I am so so fascinated
Speaker 2: by this upcoming mission from NASA. It's slated for twenty
Speaker 2: twenty seven, and it's called INCUS.
Speaker 3: Ah Yes, Investigation of Convective.
Speaker 2: Updrafts right in CUS. And from what I understand, it
Speaker 2: is this incredibly complex, highly synchronized orbital ballet designed to
Speaker 2: finally crack open that mysterious vertical engine of these tropical
Speaker 2: convective storms.
Speaker 3: It is, it really is.
Speaker 2: But I'll be honest, the deeper I look into this,
Speaker 2: the more questions I have about how they are actually
Speaker 2: pulling this off logistically.
Speaker 3: I don't blame you. It is arguably one of the
Speaker 3: most ambitious and well elegantly designed pieces of atmospheric science
Speaker 3: ever attempted.
Speaker 2: Wow.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it represents a fundamental ground up shift in how
Speaker 3: we actually look at the Earth's atmosphere.
Speaker 2: And for you listening right now, I want to make
Speaker 2: it super clear that this isn't just some you know,
Speaker 2: abstract astrophysics or a high level meteorology lessons not all.
Speaker 2: This is about the immediate future of how humanity is
Speaker 2: going to physically protected cities. This is about how your
Speaker 2: local government is going to manage your drinking water, how
Speaker 2: your homeowner's insurance is going to be calculated. Even yeah,
Speaker 2: that's a huge factor, and you know exactly how much
Speaker 2: warning you get on your phone before a flash flood
Speaker 2: literally cuts off your street. It is that direct to
Speaker 2: your everyday life.
Speaker 3: It really impacts everyone.
Speaker 2: So, okay, the core objective of this I NCUS mission
Speaker 2: is to measure something called convective.
Speaker 3: Mass flux, right, convective mass flux, and I.
Speaker 2: Understand those words individually, sure, yeah, but what does that
Speaker 2: actually mean in the context of a giant thunderstorm.
Speaker 3: Well, to really understand convective mass flux, we have to
Speaker 3: kind of fundament the only change our perspective on what
Speaker 3: a storm actually is.
Speaker 2: Okay, I'm listening.
Speaker 3: Think about how you usually interact with the weather, Like
Speaker 3: when you stand outside during a thunderstorm, or when you
Speaker 3: just pull up a weather app on your phone. You
Speaker 3: are experiencing the weather horizontally.
Speaker 2: Oh right, like on a map.
Speaker 3: Exactly. You look at the radar map and you see
Speaker 3: this green or red blob just kind of creeping from
Speaker 3: west to east across the screen.
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 3: Or you step outside and the rain is falling down
Speaker 3: on your head. We treat storms like there're these flat,
Speaker 3: horizontal phenomena. But a storm isn't a flat circle on
Speaker 3: a map. It is a towering, three dimensional, incredibly violent
Speaker 3: vertical engine.
Speaker 2: Okay, So the convection part, that's the vertical movement. It's
Speaker 2: basically the hot air rising, right, it is.
Speaker 3: But it is so much more violent and complex than
Speaker 3: just you know, hot air rising in a room. Okay,
Speaker 3: Convection at its most basic thermodynamic level is the sudden,
Speaker 3: intense lifting of massive amounts of air and water. Let's
Speaker 3: break down the actual physics of it. Do so, the
Speaker 3: sun heats the surface of the Earth, the air right
Speaker 3: above the ground gets hot, and because hot air is
Speaker 3: less dense than cold air, it becomes buoyant. It wants
Speaker 3: to rise, kind of like a hot air balloon.
Speaker 2: Right, makes sense.
Speaker 3: Now, if that air is holding a lot of evaporated water,
Speaker 3: so humidity, it carries all that invisible water vapor up
Speaker 3: with it as.
Speaker 2: It rises, right, And as you go higher up in
Speaker 2: the atmosphere, it gets.
Speaker 3: Colder exactly, And this is where the engine really ignites.
Speaker 3: As that warm, moist air rises up into the colder
Speaker 3: upper atmosphere, the atmosphere pressure drops, the air expands, and
Speaker 3: it cools down, Okay, falling so far, and when it
Speaker 3: cools that invisible water vapor can no longer stay a gas.
Speaker 3: It condenses back into liquid water droplets, and this is
Speaker 3: actually what forms cloud right. Okay, But and this is
Speaker 3: the absolutely crucial piece of the puzzle here. When water
Speaker 3: changes state from a gas back into a liquid, it
Speaker 3: releases something called latent heat.
Speaker 2: Wait, latent heat? What is that? Like heat that was
Speaker 2: somehow trapped inside the water?
Speaker 3: Yes, exactly. Think about out boiling a pot of water
Speaker 3: on your stove. Okay, you have to pump a lot
Speaker 3: of energy, the heat from your burner into the liquid
Speaker 3: water to physically force it to turn into a gas
Speaker 3: into steam. That energy doesn't just disappear, It is physically
Speaker 3: stored in the vapor itself. So later on, when that
Speaker 3: vapor rises high into the sky and condenses back into
Speaker 3: a liquid droplet, it has to release all that stored
Speaker 3: energy back into the surrounding air.
Speaker 2: Oh wow, wait, so the actual act of condensation heats
Speaker 2: up the air around it precisely.
Speaker 3: And what happens when air gets.
Speaker 2: Heated It gets more buoyant, It rises, it becomes.
Speaker 3: Even more buoyant, it rises even faster. So the very
Speaker 3: act of the cloud forming releases heat, which acts like
Speaker 3: an afterburner on a jet engine, causing the air to
Speaker 3: violently accelerate upward. That is wild, and then it pulls
Speaker 3: even more moist air up from the bottom to replace it,
Speaker 3: which then condenses, releasing more heat, causing more acceleration. It
Speaker 3: is essentially a runaway thermodynamic train.
Speaker 2: That makes so much sense when you explain it that. So,
Speaker 2: convective mass flux is basically measuring that runaway train.
Speaker 3: Yes, exactly. Convective mass flux is the measurement of that
Speaker 3: sheer volume of mass. We're talking billions of pounds of
Speaker 3: air and liquid water moving upward through a specific area
Speaker 3: over a specific amount of time. Wow, it is the
Speaker 3: raw vertical horse power of the storm.
Speaker 2: Okay, I want to try an analogy here just to
Speaker 2: see if I'm tracking this correctly.
Speaker 3: Go for it.
Speaker 2: Think of a thunderstorm like an elevator and a massive
Speaker 2: towering skyscraper. Most of the time, our current weather technology
Speaker 2: is basically just standing down in the ground floor lobby,
Speaker 2: like we have our rain gages in our ground radar,
Speaker 2: and we can basically only see when the elevator doors
Speaker 2: open and the rain just spills out into the lobby.
Speaker 3: Right, That's exactly how we do it now.
Speaker 2: Or we have these traditional weather satellites that act almost
Speaker 2: like a helicopter hovering over the roof of the skyscraper. Yes,
Speaker 2: they look down and take pictures of the top of
Speaker 2: the elevator shaft, you know, the sprawling flat anvil clouds
Speaker 2: at the very top of the storm. But we don't
Speaker 2: know what's happening in the middle exactly.
Speaker 3: It's a huge gap.
Speaker 2: So I Incus is designed to somehow look directly through
Speaker 2: the concrete walls of the building straight into the dark
Speaker 2: elevator shaft to see exactly how fast that elevator car
Speaker 2: full of water is rocketing upward.
Speaker 3: That is a brilliant way to visualize it.
Speaker 2: I really like that.
Speaker 3: Oh good, because we have been staring at the lobby
Speaker 3: in the roof for decades making educated guesses about the
Speaker 3: middle part. But the action the thermodynamic engine that actually
Speaker 3: dictates how violent that storm will be when it finally
Speaker 3: hits your neighborhood, that is happening entirely inside the shaft
Speaker 3: right The speed of that elevator and the sheer mass
Speaker 3: of water it's carrying. That convective mass flex we just
Speaker 3: talked about is the absolute key to unlocking the causality
Speaker 3: of these storms.
Speaker 2: But so, how does knowing the speed of the elevator
Speaker 2: actually change our understanding of the danger?
Speaker 3: Well, because the vertical velocity dictates the severity of the fallout. Okay,
Speaker 3: if the elevator is moving slowly, say ten or fifteen
Speaker 3: miles per hour straight up, you might get a standard
Speaker 3: kind of dreary afternoon shower. The water goes up, it condenses,
Speaker 3: and it falls back down.
Speaker 2: Gently, right, just regular rain.
Speaker 3: But if that elevator is rocketing upward at incredible speeds
Speaker 3: and I mean sometimes exceeding one hundred miles power straight up,
Speaker 3: it pulls millions of gallons of water and immense energy
Speaker 3: deep into the freezing upper atmosphere.
Speaker 2: One hundred miles an hour straight up. That's insane.
Speaker 3: It is violently fast, and that violent updraft actually suspends
Speaker 3: the water droplets high up in the freezing air, allowing
Speaker 3: them to accumulate layers and layers of ice, which is
Speaker 3: exactly how you get massive destructive hails.
Speaker 2: Oh so the hail is literally just trapped in the elevator,
Speaker 2: getting colder and colder.
Speaker 3: Precisely, and that explosive upward force is what stretches the
Speaker 3: atmosphere and creates the wind shear that spawns tornadoes, It
Speaker 3: creates torrential downpours and lethal microbursts.
Speaker 2: So if we can actually measure the speed and the
Speaker 2: mass inside that elevator shaft, we get completely different, highly
Speaker 2: active understanding of what the storm is actually capable of
Speaker 2: doing exactly.
Speaker 3: But it's not just the movement itself. ACUS isn't just
Speaker 3: a speedometer for clouds, you know. It is designed to
Speaker 3: correlate that vertical motion with a massive suite of other
Speaker 3: environmental factors. While it's measuring the updraft, the mission is
Speaker 3: simultaneously tracking the surrounding air temperature, the relative humidity, the
Speaker 3: atmospheric pressure, the wind speed, and the wind direction at
Speaker 3: all these different altitudes.
Speaker 2: But why does it need all that extra data? I mean,
Speaker 2: if the goal is to measure the updraft, isn't just
Speaker 2: knowing the speed and the mass of the water enough
Speaker 2: to tell us if a storm is dangerous?
Speaker 3: Well, knowing the speed of the elevator tells you what
Speaker 3: is happening right now, But knowing the condition of the cables,
Speaker 3: the voltage of the power supply, and the friction in
Speaker 3: the shaft tells you why it's moving. That fast and
Speaker 3: more importantly, what it's going to do next.
Speaker 2: Uh, okay, the context exactly.
Speaker 3: Let's look at windshar. For example. Windshear is the change
Speaker 3: in wind speed and direction at different altitudes.
Speaker 2: Right the wind blowing east down at the surface, but
Speaker 2: blowing north up at thirty thousand feet Exactly.
Speaker 3: If you have a powerful vertical updraft, but you have
Speaker 3: extreme wind shear ripping across the top of it, that
Speaker 3: shear might physically chop the top off the updraft, kind
Speaker 3: of choking the storm and killing it before it ever
Speaker 3: becomes severe.
Speaker 2: Oh wow, I didn't think about.
Speaker 3: That, right, Or under slightly different thermodynamic conditions, that exact
Speaker 3: same wind shear might start twisting the updraft, turning that
Speaker 3: vertical column of air into a rotating mesocyclone. And a
Speaker 3: mesocyclone is it's the parent engine of a super self
Speaker 3: thunderstorm and eventually a tornado.
Speaker 2: Oh got it.
Speaker 3: So by understanding how the humidity and temperature are fueling
Speaker 3: the lift and how the atmospheric winds are interacting with
Speaker 3: that vertical column, we move from just observing a storm
Speaker 3: to actually understanding the exact mechanical levers controlling it.
Speaker 2: That feels like a monumentally forward honestly, like, we're going
Speaker 2: from just watching a storm happen on a screen to
Speaker 2: fundamentally understanding the exact physics that make it happen in
Speaker 2: real time.
Speaker 3: It completely shifts the entire paradigm of global storm forecasting.
Speaker 3: How so well, right now, so much of our severe
Speaker 3: weather tracking is heavily reactive. A green blob appears on
Speaker 3: a radar screen. Over the next hour, it turns yellow,
Speaker 3: then dark red. An algorithm or a highly trained meteorologist
Speaker 3: interprets that color change, looks at the historical data, and
Speaker 3: issues a flash flood warning for your county.
Speaker 2: But at that point, the storm is already dumbing rain. Right,
Speaker 2: You're reacting to something that is already mature.
Speaker 3: Exactly, we are reacting to the exhaust But with the
Speaker 3: data i Incus will provide, meteorologists will actually be able
Speaker 3: to map the raw underlying mechanics of storm formation before
Speaker 3: the heavy rain even starts falling. Wow, we are moving
Speaker 3: toward predictive models that are based on the fundamental physics
Speaker 3: of the updraft itself.
Speaker 2: So instead of a weather anchor saying, hey, there's a
Speaker 2: really bad storm currently over the next town, it's headed
Speaker 2: your way. The models could theoretically say, hey, the thermodynamic
Speaker 2: conditions and the vertical mass flux of this cloud are
Speaker 2: aligning right now to create a severe destructive storm that
Speaker 2: will drop exactly three inches of rain on your neighborhood
Speaker 2: in exactly thirty four minutes.
Speaker 3: Precisely, we move from probabilities to mechanics, and the implications
Speaker 3: for that across human society are just staggering.
Speaker 2: I can imagine think about.
Speaker 3: The decision makers who run our actual infrastructure. If you
Speaker 3: manage a massive hydroelectric dam or a reservoir system for
Speaker 3: a major city, you don't just need to know that
Speaker 3: it's going to rain today. You need to know exactly
Speaker 3: how millions of gallons of water are going to be
Speaker 3: dumped into your specific watershed and how.
Speaker 2: Fast right because if you guess wrong, the dam overflows
Speaker 2: and causes a flood, or you release way too much
Speaker 2: water too early and risk a drought later in the year.
Speaker 3: Exactly, the stakes are huge. With predictive vertical modeling, you
Speaker 3: can proactively manage freshwater supplies with incredible precision. You can
Speaker 3: mitigate billions of dollars in property damage. You can cord
Speaker 3: emergency responses evacuate specific floodplanes and even route air traffic
Speaker 3: with a lead time and an accuracy that is just
Speaker 3: currently impossible.
Speaker 2: Okay, conceptually I am completely sold. The value of measuring
Speaker 2: this vertical elevator is undeniable good. But as we get
Speaker 2: into the actual how, I start running into major logical roadblocks. Okay,
Speaker 2: lay them on me, because measuring something that is moving,
Speaker 2: that violently spanning miles of atmosphere and constantly changing second
Speaker 2: by second, that poses a massive logistical problem. It does
Speaker 2: like if you take a single static photograph of an explosion,
Speaker 2: you don't really understand the physics of it. To measure
Speaker 2: a vertical engine that is constantly accelerating and collapsing, a
Speaker 2: single snapshot isn't enough. You have to watch it evolve
Speaker 2: over time. That's entirely correct, which leads us to the
Speaker 2: actual physical orbital design of the Incus mission itself. And
Speaker 2: this is where my mind really starts to bend.
Speaker 3: The orbital mechanics required to pull this off are truly
Speaker 3: something to behold. It is a absolute masterpiece of precision engineering.
Speaker 2: So I Incus is not just one big satellite, which
Speaker 2: is what we usually expect from NASA, right, It is
Speaker 2: a synchronized fleet. Specifically, it uses three small sat at
Speaker 2: those small satellites flying in this incredibly tight coordinated formation
Speaker 2: in low Earth orbit, Yes, three of them. And the
Speaker 2: spacing between these three satellites is what I just do
Speaker 2: not understand. The first and second satellites are separated by
Speaker 2: exactly thirty seconds of flight time, correct, and then the
Speaker 2: second and third satellites are separated by ninety.
Speaker 3: Seconds, making a total continuous viewing window of exactly one
Speaker 3: hundred and twenty seconds two minutes.
Speaker 2: Okay, I have to push back here, yeah, because the
Speaker 2: math and the logic feel super contradictory. First, why use
Speaker 2: three small satellites instead of just building one massive, super
Speaker 2: powerful flagship observatory. I mean, NASA is famous for these
Speaker 2: giant school bus side multi billion dollar satellites with massive
Speaker 2: power grids. Why chop the mission up into three tiny pieces?
Speaker 3: That's a very question.
Speaker 2: And more importantly, if you are doing that, why this
Speaker 2: incredibly specific, completely asymmetrical timing thirty seconds and then a
Speaker 2: ninety second gap That seems so strangely specific.
Speaker 3: It is very specific.
Speaker 2: Yes, and beyond that, these satellites are orbiting at what
Speaker 2: seventeen thousand miles per hour.
Speaker 3: Roughly seventeen thousand, five hundred miles per.
Speaker 2: Are you right, and a thunderstorm has winds of maybe
Speaker 2: fifty to one hundred miles per hour. So in the
Speaker 2: one hundred and twenty seconds between the first satellite and
Speaker 2: the third satellite passing over, the storm has physically moved
Speaker 2: miles away from its original location, and the Earth itself
Speaker 2: is rotating underneath them. How are they even looking at
Speaker 2: the same thing?
Speaker 3: Okay, these are excellent questions, and they honestly hit at
Speaker 3: the very heart of why this mission took so much
Speaker 3: engineering to design. Let's tackle the why three instead of
Speaker 3: one first. Okay, As you pointed out, a thunderstorm is
Speaker 3: a violently dynamic, constantly evolving system. If you have a
Speaker 3: single massive flagship satellite orbiting the Earth at seventeen thousand,
Speaker 3: five hundred miles per hour, it passes over a storm
Speaker 3: in a fraction of an instant.
Speaker 2: Right, it's flying by super fast.
Speaker 3: It can take one incredibly detailed, very high resolution snapshot.
Speaker 3: But tropical convective storms evolve in a matter of seconds.
Speaker 2: Right, The updraft can suddenly surge or just collapse completely.
Speaker 3: Exactly in the time it takes you to walk to
Speaker 3: your kitchen and pour a cup of coffee. An updraft
Speaker 3: can explode in intensity from a gentle lift to a
Speaker 3: severe destructive force. So a single snapshot from a massive
Speaker 3: satellite gives you the state of the storm at time zero,
Speaker 3: but it gives you no rate of change. It gives
Speaker 3: you no acceleration. You don't know if the storm is growing, dying,
Speaker 3: or just holding study.
Speaker 2: It's literally just a single frame of a movie. You
Speaker 2: can't tell the plot precisely.
Speaker 3: To really understand a dynamic system, you need multiple cameras
Speaker 3: passing by sequentially. You need an orbital stop motion animation,
Speaker 3: and that dictates the need for a fleet and it
Speaker 3: specifically dictates that asymmetrical timing.
Speaker 2: So the one hundred and twenty seconds is on purpose.
Speaker 1: Yes, the one.
Speaker 3: Hundred and twenty second total window is the precise thermo
Speaker 3: dynamic Goldilocks zone for witnessing a convective updraft.
Speaker 2: Evolve, Let me try a different analogy for this timing,
Speaker 2: because the thirty to ninety second gaps so so specific.
Speaker 2: Go ahead, think about automotive engineers trying to analyze a
Speaker 2: high speed car crash.
Speaker 3: Okay, interesting, if.
Speaker 2: They just have two pictures, like a picture of the
Speaker 2: prescine car before the crash and then a picture of
Speaker 2: the mangled wreck ten minutes later. They have absolutely no
Speaker 2: idea about the physics.
Speaker 3: Of the impact, right, they just see the before and
Speaker 3: after exactly.
Speaker 2: To understand the safety systems, they need high speed frames
Speaker 2: at incredibly specific intervals right when the crash happens.
Speaker 3: That is a highly accurate comparison.
Speaker 2: Okay, So the first satellite is like the camera capturing
Speaker 2: the baseline. It takes a reading of the storm at
Speaker 2: times zero right before the crash.
Speaker 3: Yes, it maps the vertical precipitation profile and the environmental
Speaker 3: state right as the sequence begins.
Speaker 2: Then exactly thirty seconds later, the second satellite flies over.
Speaker 2: And the reason it's thirty seconds is because in a
Speaker 2: car crash you need a photo roughly one second after
Speaker 2: impact to see the crumple zone fail, because the initial
Speaker 2: explosive transfer of energy happens basically instantly. Yeah, is that
Speaker 2: what happens in a storm? Does it explode instantly?
Speaker 3: That is exactly the physics at play here. Remember that
Speaker 3: latent heat we talked about.
Speaker 2: Earlier, Oh right, the boiling water analogy.
Speaker 3: Yes, when that water vapor condenses and releases heat. The
Speaker 3: resulting acceleration of the updraft isn't some slow and steady
Speaker 3: build up. It is an explosive exponential surge.
Speaker 2: Wow.
Speaker 3: Okay, that initial violent vertical velocity happens incredibly fast. So
Speaker 3: that specific thirty second window between the first and second
Speaker 3: satellite is designed to catch the immediate rapid changes in
Speaker 3: the vertical speed of the air and water. It tells
Speaker 3: us the raw acceleration of the elevator right as the
Speaker 3: engine redlines.
Speaker 2: So Satellite one gives us the starting speed. Satellite two
Speaker 2: thirty seconds later gives us the massive acceleration. It shows
Speaker 2: us the crumple zone failing in real time.
Speaker 3: Yes, and then the third satellite arrives ninety seconds after
Speaker 3: the second one, which makes it two full minutes after
Speaker 3: the first satellite. Okay, this captures the longer term evolution
Speaker 3: of the updraft. Has that violent thirty second surge sustained itself?
Speaker 3: Has the updraft collapsed under the sheer weight of the
Speaker 3: millions of gallons of water it just lifted? Or is
Speaker 3: that rising air now hitting the top of the troposphere
Speaker 3: and spreading out horizontally to form that massive anvil cloud?
Speaker 2: So the ninety second gap is like looking at the
Speaker 2: car crash ten seconds later to see where the debris
Speaker 2: actually landed exactly.
Speaker 3: It is a perfectly choreographed sequence designed specifically around the
Speaker 3: physical timeline of atmospheric thermodynamics. You get the baseline state,
Speaker 3: the immediate explosive acceleration, and the sustained evolution and fallout,
Speaker 3: all mapped perfectly in a one hundred and twenty second
Speaker 3: stop motion orbital dance.
Speaker 2: That is amazing, But what about the movement? Do you
Speaker 2: have three satellites screaming across the sky at seventeen thousand
Speaker 2: miles per hour and the storm moving across the ground,
Speaker 2: how do they physically look at the exact same spot
Speaker 2: one hundred and twenty seconds later.
Speaker 3: It comes down to the alignment of the orbital plane
Speaker 3: and the footprint of the radar beam itself.
Speaker 2: Okay, how so well, the.
Speaker 3: Three satellites are flying in the exact same orbital track
Speaker 3: in what we call a string of pearls formation, one
Speaker 3: right behind the other, and the radar beam they project
Speaker 3: down to the Earth isn't like a tiny laser pointer,
Speaker 3: it's a much wider footprint. Ay, So, while the Earth
Speaker 3: does rotate slightly and the storm does move a fraction
Speaker 3: of a mile during those one hundred twenty seconds. The
Speaker 3: swath of the radar beam is wide enough that the
Speaker 3: entire core of the updraft remains within the field of
Speaker 3: view for all three passes.
Speaker 2: Okay, that makes a lot more sense, right.
Speaker 3: And then complex algorithms on the ground align the three
Speaker 3: images perfectly based on the GPS coordinates, creating a totally
Speaker 3: seamless time lapse.
Speaker 2: That is unbelievable. But to pull off a one hundred
Speaker 2: and twenty second high speed vertical stop motion animation from
Speaker 2: the literal vacuum of space, these satellites need some highly
Speaker 2: specialized eyes.
Speaker 3: They absolutely do.
Speaker 2: You can't just slap a commercial digital care onto a
Speaker 2: metal box and shoot it into orbit to look inside
Speaker 2: a cloud, which brings us to the actual anatogy of
Speaker 2: these small SATs and looking at how they are built.
Speaker 2: The hardware packed into these things is an absolute master
Speaker 2: class in miniaturization and well collaboration.
Speaker 3: The sheer number of moving parts, both physically on the
Speaker 3: spacecraft and organizationally across the entire country is.
Speaker 2: Staggering, right, Because this isn't just one lab building everything
Speaker 2: in a basement somewhere we have NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory
Speaker 2: JPL out in southern California, who built the actual spaceborne radar.
Speaker 3: Yes, the masters of radar.
Speaker 2: We have a commercial company called ten Dig based in Lousville, Colorado,
Speaker 2: who built these deployable mesh radar reflectors. Then we have
Speaker 2: the middle satellite, which uniquely carries a microwave radiometer, also
Speaker 2: built by JPL. And all of this delicate, world class
Speaker 2: instrumentation is packed into the actual spacecraft buses, the metal
Speaker 2: bodies of the satellites, which were built by Blue Canyon
Speaker 2: Technologies in Lafayette, Colorado.
Speaker 3: The integration of all these disparate components into a unified
Speaker 3: functioning fleet is an engineering marvel. I mean it requires
Speaker 3: tolerances measured in fractions of a millimeter.
Speaker 2: Let's focus on those tolerances because the phrase deployable mesh
Speaker 2: radar reflector sounds completely wild to me.
Speaker 3: It's an incredible piece of tech.
Speaker 2: I look at that and I liken it to a
Speaker 2: high tech pop up tent because usually when we think
Speaker 2: of radar, especially deep space or high powered weather radar,
Speaker 2: we think of massive, rigid, solid metal bowls.
Speaker 3: Yeah, the giant dishes, right.
Speaker 2: Think of a satellite dish on the roof of a building,
Speaker 2: but the size of a house. But these are small sects.
Speaker 2: They are roughly the size of mini fridge. How do
Speaker 2: you physically cram world class observatory level radar equipment into
Speaker 2: a box that's small.
Speaker 3: The simple answer is you have to fold it up.
Speaker 3: And that is where the absolute genius of the deployable.
Speaker 2: Mesh comes in. Okay, fold it up.
Speaker 3: How when you launch a rocket, the most expensive and
Speaker 3: limited resource you have is the volume inside the payload
Speaker 3: fairing the nose cone of the rocket.
Speaker 2: Right, there's barely any room exactly.
Speaker 3: You cannot launch a massive, rigid metal radar dish on
Speaker 3: a small, cost effective rocket. It simply won't fit. So
Speaker 3: the engineers at Tendeg design these reflectors to be stowed
Speaker 3: incredibly tightly against the side of the spacecraft bus during
Speaker 3: the violent ride to space.
Speaker 2: Okay, so it's packed down completely flat.
Speaker 3: Yes, And once the satellites reach low Earth orbit and
Speaker 3: they detach from the launch vehicle, the mechanisms trigger and
Speaker 3: these reflectors deploy. They mechanically unfold, springing outward to form
Speaker 3: a highly tensioned parabolic dish.
Speaker 2: Literally like popping open umbrella when you step out into
Speaker 2: the rain.
Speaker 3: Exactly like an umbrella, but here is the critical difference.
Speaker 3: This umbrella has to hold a perfect parabolic shape to
Speaker 3: fractions of a millimeter while operating in the freezing cold
Speaker 3: and boiling heat of the vacuum of space, all while
Speaker 3: bouncing highly calibrated radar pulses deep into the Earth's atmosphere apostle.
Speaker 3: It's not easy. The mesh itself is a specialized material,
Speaker 3: often a gold plated molybdimum wire, and it's woven so
Speaker 3: tightly that the radar waves actually treat it as a
Speaker 3: solid surface.
Speaker 2: Wait, how does that work? If it's a mesh, doesn't
Speaker 2: it have holes in it?
Speaker 3: It does?
Speaker 2: Why wouldn't the radar energy just pass right through the
Speaker 2: holes in the mesh like a sieve.
Speaker 3: It comes down to the physics of electromagnetic wavelengths. The
Speaker 3: radar waves being emitted by the JPL instrument have a
Speaker 3: specific physical length. Okay, as long as the holes in
Speaker 3: the mesh are significantly smaller than a fraction of that
Speaker 3: specific radar wavelength, the wave physically cannot pass to the gap.
Speaker 3: The wave interacts with the mesh as if it were
Speaker 3: a perfectly smooth, solid sheet of metal.
Speaker 2: Oh that's brilliant. So it's a solid mirror to the radar.
Speaker 2: But it's light and flexible enough to fold up into
Speaker 2: a tiny box for.
Speaker 3: Launch precisely, And this miniaturization and folding technology is exactly
Speaker 3: what makes coordinated multi satellite missions financially and physically possible today.
Speaker 2: Right, because otherwise it would be way too big.
Speaker 3: Exactly if you had to use traditional rigid metal dishes,
Speaker 3: you would need three massive rockets to launch them, and
Speaker 3: the cost would be absolutely astronomical. The deployable mesh democratizes
Speaker 3: the science, but there is.
Speaker 2: A massive quirk in this hardware lineup that we need
Speaker 2: to unpack. The three satellites in this orbital ballet aren't
Speaker 2: identical twins or I guess triplets. No, they're not. The
Speaker 2: first satellite and the third satellite are relatively similar. They
Speaker 2: both have the radar, but that middle satellite, the one
Speaker 2: that arrives at the critical thirty second mark to measure
Speaker 2: the explosive acceleration, is completely different.
Speaker 3: Yes it is.
Speaker 2: It carries the radar, sure, but it also carries a
Speaker 2: microwave radiometer. Why does only the middle satellite have this
Speaker 2: and what does a radiometer actually do.
Speaker 3: To understand the radiometer, we have to look at the
Speaker 3: fundamental difference between active and passive instruments. The spaceborne radars
Speaker 3: built by JPL are active instruments. They are actively shooting
Speaker 3: pulses of electromagnetic energy down into the storm and then
Speaker 3: they wait to measure how much of that energy bounces
Speaker 3: back off the physical water droplets and ice crystals inside
Speaker 3: the updraft.
Speaker 2: So the radar is taking a literal vertical X ray
Speaker 2: of the elevator shaft. It's pinging the physical mass.
Speaker 3: Yes, it gives you the high resolution vertical precipitation profile.
Speaker 3: It shows you exactly where the dense water and ice
Speaker 3: are located. But an X ray only shows you the
Speaker 3: bones of a system, right, It doesn't show you the tissue,
Speaker 3: the blood flow, or the temperature of the room the
Speaker 3: patient is standing in. And that is exactly where the
Speaker 3: microwave radiometer comes in. A radiometer is a passive instrument.
Speaker 3: It doesn't send out pulses of energy. It simply opens
Speaker 3: its eyes and listens.
Speaker 2: What is it listening for microwaves?
Speaker 3: Yes, specifically it is measuring the natural microwave radiation being
Speaker 3: emitted by the Earth's atmosphere itself.
Speaker 2: Wait, the atmosphere emits microwave radiation like a kitchen appliance.
Speaker 3: Yes, but on a much, much famper scale. It comes
Speaker 3: down to Plank's law and black body radiation. Every object
Speaker 3: in the universe above absolute zero emits electromagnetic radiation based
Speaker 3: on its temperature.
Speaker 2: Okay, I think I remember that from high school physics right.
Speaker 3: And in the Earth's atmosphere, molecules of water vapor are
Speaker 3: constantly vibrating and rotating. As they vibrate, they emit incredibly
Speaker 3: faint signals in the microwave spectrum. The microwave radiometer on
Speaker 3: the middle satellite is tuned to the exact frequencies of
Speaker 3: those specific water vapor emissions, so.
Speaker 2: It can essentially see invisible humidity exactly.
Speaker 3: By listening to these faint microwave whispers, the radiometer can
Speaker 3: measure the total amount of invisible water vapor in the
Speaker 3: entire atmospheric column. It can measure the liquid water content
Speaker 3: of the surrounding clouds and the environmental temperature profile.
Speaker 2: Wow.
Speaker 3: The radiometer provides the wide angle atmospheric soup that the
Speaker 3: storm is swimming in.
Speaker 2: Oh I see. So the radar gives you the sharp
Speaker 2: vertical spike of the updraft itself the bones, but the
Speaker 2: radiometer gives you the humidity and the temperature surrounding that updraft,
Speaker 2: the fuel that is actually feeding the engine.
Speaker 3: Precisely, it acts as the thermodynamic anchor for the n
Speaker 3: entire measurement, and you place it on the middle satellite
Speaker 3: because that gives you the perfect midpoint spatial context for
Speaker 3: the entire hundred and twenty second evolution.
Speaker 2: That makes total sense, right.
Speaker 3: While the first and third satellites are getting the book
Speaker 3: ends of the vertical motion, the middle satellite is simultaneously
Speaker 3: capturing the explosive vertical acceleration and taking a massive wide
Speaker 3: angle snapshot of the environmental fuel feeding the whole process.
Speaker 2: The level of mechanical and orbital coordination here is just unbelievable.
Speaker 2: I mean, you have this intricately folded hardware packed with
Speaker 2: active X ray vision radars and passive listening radiometers built
Speaker 2: by different academic and commercial teams across the country, all
Speaker 2: designed to fly in a perfect one and twenty second
Speaker 2: stop motion dance.
Speaker 3: It's a symphony, really.
Speaker 2: But as anyone who has ever built a computer or
Speaker 2: renovated house knows. Building the individual hardware components is only
Speaker 2: half the battle. Ensuring that these delicate, high tech pop
Speaker 2: up tents actually survive being strapped to a controlled explosion
Speaker 2: and hurled into a deadly vacuum that is the next
Speaker 2: massive hurdle.
Speaker 3: Ah. The environment these machines must survive before they ever
Speaker 3: take their first measurement is remarkably unforgiving. The testing phase
Speaker 3: is often where missions literally live or.
Speaker 2: Die, and the logistics of this pre launch phase sound
Speaker 2: like an absolute nightmare. It is basically a high stakes,
Speaker 2: highly fragile, multi state road trip.
Speaker 3: It really is.
Speaker 2: In late twenty twenty five and early twenty twenty six,
Speaker 2: all these components started shipping around the country. The radars
Speaker 2: left SoCal went to Blue Canyon and Colorado for integration
Speaker 2: into the spacecraft buses. Then the first two assembled observatories
Speaker 2: successfully underwent their vibration and thermal vacuum testing. Then they
Speaker 2: were packed up in clean rooms and ship back across
Speaker 2: Colorado to ten dig for test deployments of the delicate
Speaker 2: metch reflectors. Then they were shipped back again to Blue
Speaker 2: Canyon for even more system testing. The third satellite doesn't
Speaker 2: even finish the scauntlant until September, and eventually they all
Speaker 2: have to be safely transported to NASA's Wallups Flight Facility
Speaker 2: in Virginia for the actual twenty twenty seven launch.
Speaker 3: It is a relentless, exist exhausting logistical gauntlet. Every single
Speaker 3: time you move a spacecraft you introduce the risk of
Speaker 3: contamination or physical damage. But the extreme testing at each
Speaker 3: of these facilities is absolutely non negotiably necessary.
Speaker 2: I really want to talk about that testing gallet, because
Speaker 2: the terms vibration testing and thermal vacuum testing are thrown
Speaker 2: around a lot. I know what vibration is, and I
Speaker 2: know what a vacuum is, but what does this actually
Speaker 2: look like in a laboratory for a multimillion dollar satellite.
Speaker 2: Let's start with the vibration.
Speaker 3: Launching a rocket into orbit is not a smooth elevator ride.
Speaker 3: It is incredibly violent. When you sit a payload on
Speaker 3: top of a rocket, you are placing it above hundreds
Speaker 3: of thousands of pounds of highly explosive liquid fuel.
Speaker 2: Right, It's basically a bomb.
Speaker 3: Essentially, Yes, When those engines ignite, they don't just push
Speaker 3: the rocket up. They create an acoustic shock wave of
Speaker 3: sound and physical force that bounces off the launch piss
Speaker 3: and rips right back up through the body of the
Speaker 3: rocket ouch. The g forces, the physical shaking, and the
Speaker 3: acoustic resonance inside the enclosed payload firing are deafening and brutal.
Speaker 3: It is enough physical energy to vibrate delicate electronics into
Speaker 3: literal dust if they aren't engineered correctly.
Speaker 2: So to test it do they basically put the satellite
Speaker 2: on a giant subwarffer and just turn the bass all
Speaker 2: the way up.
Speaker 3: That's essentially what an acoustic chamber is. Yes, through a
Speaker 3: massive mechanical shaker table. Oh, this table is programmed to
Speaker 3: simulate the exact physical frequency and amplitude profile of the
Speaker 3: specific rocket engine they will be launching on. They violently
Speaker 3: shake the spacecraft on all three axis, the X, y,
Speaker 3: and Z axis, and.
Speaker 2: What happens if it fails? I mean, what is the
Speaker 2: weakest link here?
Speaker 3: The weakest link is almost always the deployable mechanisms. Think
Speaker 3: back to that mesh radar reflector. It is folded up
Speaker 3: with springs, hinges and tension cables. Right during that vibration test,
Speaker 3: every single screw, every solder joint on the motherboard and
Speaker 3: every folded hinge of that umbrella has to hold together perfectly.
Speaker 3: If the acoustic resonance hits the exact natural frequency of
Speaker 3: a single locking pin and that pin rattles loose during launch,
Speaker 3: the reflector will not deploy it when it reaches orbit.
Speaker 3: Yeh man, it will stay jammed against the side of
Speaker 3: the bus, and a third of your entire mission is
Speaker 3: basically dead on arrival.
Speaker 2: That is parrifying. You spend years designing this delicate instrument
Speaker 2: and then you just physically shake the life out of
Speaker 2: it for hours to make sure it doesn't break. And
Speaker 2: if it survives that, it moves on to the thermal
Speaker 2: vacuum testing.
Speaker 3: Yes, colloquially known in aerospace as.
Speaker 2: The shake and Bake Shake and big Nice.
Speaker 3: Once it survives the physical violence of the launch simulation,
Speaker 3: it has to prove it can survive the environment of space.
Speaker 3: So they put the entire satellite into a massive steel
Speaker 3: thermal vacuum chamber. They seal the massive door and powerful
Speaker 3: pumps suck all the atmospheric air out, dropping the pressure
Speaker 3: to simulate the hard vacuum of low Earth orbit.
Speaker 2: And then what they just blast it with heat lamps.
Speaker 3: Yes, but the massive swings in temperature are what actually
Speaker 3: make it lethal. Low Earth orbit is an environment of intense,
Speaker 3: rapid extremes. Because there is no atmosphere to insulate the
Speaker 3: spacecraft or conduct heat away from it, the temperature is
Speaker 3: dictated entirely by direct radiation from the Sun. When the
Speaker 3: satellite is on the day side of the Earth, in
Speaker 3: direct unfiltered sunlight, the temperatures on the hull can ski
Speaker 3: rocket to hundreds of degrees fahrenheit above zero.
Speaker 2: The metal is literally baking exactly.
Speaker 3: But then as the satellite travels at seventeen thousand miles
Speaker 3: per hour, it passes behind the Earth into its shadow
Speaker 3: the night side, and it gets cold, very cold. Without
Speaker 3: the sun, the temperature instantly plunges into the darkness of space,
Speaker 3: dropping to hundreds of degrees below zero.
Speaker 2: And it does that orbit what every ninety.
Speaker 3: Minutes, Roughly every ninety minutes. Imagine taking a piece of
Speaker 3: delicate electronics out of a roaring oven and immediately dropping
Speaker 3: it into liquid nitrogen over and over fifteen times a day.
Speaker 2: That would destroy my phone instantly.
Speaker 3: The physics of thermal expansion become your absolute worst enemy.
Speaker 3: Materials expand when they get hot and shrink when they
Speaker 3: get cold. If the metal frame of mesh reflector expands
Speaker 3: at a slightly different rate than the mesh wire itself,
Speaker 3: the tension breaks. Oh right, the parabolic shape warps, the
Speaker 3: radar beam loses focus, and your data is completely useless. Furthermore,
Speaker 3: electronics generate their own heat without error. To carry that
Speaker 3: heat away via convection, the internal computers can literally cook
Speaker 3: themselves from the inside in the vacuum. If the thermal
Speaker 3: radiators aren't perfectly designed.
Speaker 2: It's just a punishing, rigorous environment. They have to absolutely
Speaker 2: guarantee that this intricate one hundred and twenty second orbital
Speaker 2: dance will work flawlessly, because once it's up there, no
Speaker 2: human hands can ever reach it to tighten a screw
Speaker 2: or fix a jammed hinge.
Speaker 3: That's exactly right. The testing phase is the only insurance
Speaker 3: policy you have.
Speaker 2: As we talk through the sheer complexity of this, you
Speaker 2: know the JPL radars, the Blue Canyon buses, the Tendig reflectors,
Speaker 2: the wallup's launch facility. It really highlights how many different names, companies,
Speaker 2: and disciplines are involved in this one single project. It's
Speaker 2: a huge ecosystem, right, It's not just a bunch of
Speaker 2: guys in white lab coats in a single NASA basement anymore.
Speaker 2: And this leads directly into something that I think is
Speaker 2: fundamentally changing the entire way we explore our own planet.
Speaker 3: The organizational structure and the philosophy of this mission are
Speaker 3: just as innovative and frankly just as important as the
Speaker 3: hardware itself.
Speaker 2: Right. So, the NSEUS mission is led by a principal investigator,
Speaker 2: Sue Vand and Heaver out of Colorado State University in FOURT. Collins.
Speaker 3: Yes, she's brilliant.
Speaker 2: It is part of NASA's broader Earth System observatory program,
Speaker 2: but specifically it belongs to an architecture called FALCON. That
Speaker 2: is an acronym that stands for Fleet for the atmosphere
Speaker 2: linking commercial observations with NASA.
Speaker 3: Yes, Falcon.
Speaker 2: So what does that actually mean in practice? What does
Speaker 2: it mean to be actively linking commercial observations with NASA
Speaker 2: in this specific way? And why is that a big deal?
Speaker 3: This touches on one of the most critical evolutions in
Speaker 3: the history of space exploration and Earth science historically. If
Speaker 3: you look back at the grand era of Earth observation
Speaker 3: satellites the eighties, the nineties and early two thousands, the
Speaker 3: paradigm was almost entirely monolithic.
Speaker 2: What do you mean by monolithic.
Speaker 3: I mean massive, singular, and highly centralized. NASA would identify
Speaker 3: a broad scientific need, a single NASA center would spend
Speaker 3: years designing the instruments. Then a massive traditional aerospace prime
Speaker 3: contractor would be hired to build an enormous multicuon spacecraft
Speaker 3: bus just to house it. It would take fifteen to
Speaker 3: twenty years of development, cost billions of dollars, and launch
Speaker 3: as a singular flagship mission like.
Speaker 2: The Lansat satellites. Are those massive weather observatories.
Speaker 3: Exactly, And to be clear, those are incredible machines that
Speaker 3: have provided invaluable data. But the monolithic paradigm has massive,
Speaker 3: massive drawbacks. It is agonizingly slow to develop, it is
Speaker 3: unspeakably expensive, and most importantly, it creates a terrifying single
Speaker 3: point of failure.
Speaker 2: Oh because if it breaks, if.
Speaker 3: That one rocket explodes on the launch pad, or if
Speaker 3: one critical instrument fails to deploy an orbit, two decades
Speaker 3: of science and billions of dollars evaporate instantly. The entire
Speaker 3: field of studies stalls out for another twenty years while
Speaker 3: they try to scrape together the budget to build a replacement.
Speaker 2: That is a terrifying way to do science, putting all
Speaker 2: your eggs in one billion dollar basket.
Speaker 3: Precisely, the shift we are seeing now, which is perfectly
Speaker 3: embodied by the Falcon architecture, is the shift toward the
Speaker 3: fleet mentality. It's about agility, modularity, scalability, and interconnectedness.
Speaker 2: Okay, I like those buzzwords.
Speaker 3: By intentionally linking academic institutions like Colorado State University, commercial
Speaker 3: space partners like Tendig and Blue Canyon Technologies, and traditional
Speaker 3: government centers like JPL, the science becomes vastly more nimble
Speaker 3: and resilient.
Speaker 2: So instead of NASA having to invent the entire spacecraft
Speaker 2: bus from scratch and design every single thruster and solar panel,
Speaker 2: they can just go to the commercial sector. Exactly, they
Speaker 2: can go to a company like Blue Canyon who says, hey,
Speaker 2: we already mass produce these highly reliable, standardized small satellite buses.
Speaker 2: Just bolt your GPL radar onto the top of it.
Speaker 3: That is exactly the model. The commercial space sector over
Speaker 3: the last decade has driven the cost of access to
Speaker 3: space and the cost of standardized satellite components down to
Speaker 3: a tiny fraction.
Speaker 2: Of what they used to be, which is awesome.
Speaker 3: It is NASA can leverage that relentless commercial speed and
Speaker 3: manufacturing efficiency while still providing the world class, bespoke scientific
Speaker 3: instruments that only a place like JPL has the expertise
Speaker 3: to build. And crucially, the principal investigator at the university
Speaker 3: gets to focus almost entirely on the science, the data
Speaker 3: and the meteorology, rather than spending their entire career managing
Speaker 3: a monolithic, decade long engineering program.
Speaker 2: It's almost like building an observatory with commercial legos, but
Speaker 2: on a massive governmental and academic scale.
Speaker 3: And the word fleet in falcon is the most crucial part.
Speaker 3: INCFS is one specific mission looking at updrafts, but it
Speaker 3: is part of a much larger, overlapping network of atmosphere
Speaker 3: observing satellite right there are others. By utilizing cheap commercial
Speaker 3: small SATs, NASA can launch dozens of smaller targeted missions.
Speaker 3: They combine data from different hardware contributions across this entire fleet.
Speaker 3: If one satellite in the fleet fails, you lose a
Speaker 3: tiny fraction of your data, not the entire mission.
Speaker 2: You don't lose the whole science program.
Speaker 3: Exactly you start to build a continuous, real time, highly resilient,
Speaker 3: three dimensional model of the Earth's atmosphere fed by a
Speaker 3: swarm of sensors, rather than relying on one giant satellite
Speaker 3: that only passes over your city every few days.
Speaker 2: And bringing this all back to you, the listener sitting
Speaker 2: in your car or walking your dog right now. This
Speaker 2: interconnected fleet mentality is exactly what is going to power
Speaker 2: the future of your daily life. Absolutely, this agility, this
Speaker 2: constant overlapping stream of data from commercial and NASA sensors
Speaker 2: is what will eventually drive the weather alerts right on
Speaker 2: your phone. It is the fundamental difference between getting a broad,
Speaker 2: vague warning that your general county might experience heavy rains
Speaker 2: sometime tonight versus an urgent, incredibly precise alert that a
Speaker 2: specific catastrophic flash flood is going to hit your exact
Speaker 2: neighborhood in twenty two minutes.
Speaker 3: It's the democratization of data. The transition from massive, monolithic
Speaker 3: science to this agile, interconnected fleet is what takes these
Speaker 3: complex atmospheric discoveries out of the esoteric academic journals and
Speaker 3: puts them directly into the hands of emergency managers. City
Speaker 3: planners and the public.
Speaker 2: It's what helps your local government know exactly when to
Speaker 2: open the spillways on the reservoir, saving millions in infrastructure
Speaker 2: damage and preserving the drinking water you rely on for
Speaker 2: the rest of the year. So to pull all of
Speaker 2: these complex threads together, we are looking at a very
Speaker 2: near future where we are launching a synchronized high speed
Speaker 2: orbital ballet of small satellites. We are using commercially supported
Speaker 2: deployable pop up space radars to take a perfectly timed
Speaker 2: one hundred and twenty second stop motion X ray of
Speaker 2: the violent vertical engines that drive our global weather. We
Speaker 2: are finally peering inside the invisible elevator shaft with the
Speaker 2: tropical convective storms that simultaneously give us life and threaten
Speaker 2: our cities.
Speaker 3: It is a monumental, hard fought leap forward in our
Speaker 3: understanding of the planet's thermodynamic engine. But if we project
Speaker 3: this capability forward, if we follow the logic of the
Speaker 3: science to its ultimate conclusion, it actually leaves us with
Speaker 3: a truly profound and maybe even slightly unsettling thought to consider.
Speaker 2: Oh wow, okay, what's that?
Speaker 3: Well, if the NINGQS mission and the massive broader falcon
Speaker 3: fleet that follows it eventually allow us to perfectly map
Speaker 3: the exact seconds the storm decides to become destructive.
Speaker 2: Right if we know exactly what it's doing.
Speaker 3: Exactly, if we truly understand the thermodynamic levers, the precise
Speaker 3: convective mass flux, the humidity, and the wind shear that
Speaker 3: tips a storm from a gentle rain maker into a
Speaker 3: catastrophic lethal event. How long until humanity moves from simply
Speaker 3: forecasting severe weather to actively trying to intervene in its development?
Speaker 2: Oh wow, I didn't even think of that.
Speaker 3: If you know the precise moment, the exact minute and location,
Speaker 3: where that updraft engine is redlining and accelerating toward a
Speaker 3: tornado or a massive hail event, do you just watch
Speaker 3: it happen and send out a siren warning? Or as
Speaker 3: the technology catches up to the predictive models, do you
Speaker 3: eventually try to physically throw a wrench into the elevator shaft?
Speaker 2: Like, actually stop it?
Speaker 3: Do you see the cloud alter the temperature or somehow
Speaker 3: disrupt the shear before it kills people?
Speaker 2: Weather modification based on perfect real time predictive mechanics. That
Speaker 2: is a massive, incredibly heavy thought to leave off on
Speaker 2: well as we all keep watching the lobby doors open
Speaker 2: and the rainfall down. At least now we know there's
Speaker 2: a synchronized fleet of satellites getting ready to look inside
Speaker 2: the concrete walls of the skyscraper. Until next time, keep
Speaker 2: looking up