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Summary of the 2023 Precipitation Measurement Mission Science Team Meeting [1]

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Date: 2024-06 

George Huffman [NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC)—GPM Project Scientist and PMM ST Lead] provided an update on the projected lifetime for GPM. Based on fuel usage alone, GPM should continue to December 2027. However, the amount of solar activity has an impact on that calculation. The Sun is expected to be quite active over the next few years as we approach the Solar Maximum for Solar Cycle 25—which could shorten GPM’s lifetime by as much as four years. He noted that a controlled reentry of the GPM Core spacecraft is planned—and enough fuel has to be kept in reserve to allow this to happen. Huffman discussed a recently developed plan for boosting the orbit of the GPM core satellite—for more details on the plan, see the subsection, “GPM Core Observatory Boost,” later in this article. He added that NASA and JAXA have both approved the plan and deemed its implementation critical for overlap with AOS for instrument intercomparison. The boosting is currently scheduled for November 7–9, 2023.(Update: Since the meeting in September, the GPM orbit boost was executed successfully on the scheduled dates.) The impact of the boosting on radiometer algorithms (e.g., for the GPM Microwave Imager (GMI)) is expected to be less than the impact on the radar algorithms (e.g., for the GPM Dual-Frequency Precipitation Radar, (DPR)). The potential impact on the combined algorithms (i.e., algorithms used to combine data from GMI and DPR) is still being assessed.

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[1] Url: https://science.nasa.gov/uncategorized/summary-of-the-2023-precipitation-measurement-mission-science-team-meeting/

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