Launching in 2027, a new NASA space instrument with ties to the University of Colorado Boulder will begin orbiting Earth to track the amount of energy that’s leaving the planet daily.
The space instrument, called Libera, will measure all radiation leaving Earth, including light at all wavelengths, on a day-by-day basis. Radiation is a type of energy that moves in waves or particles, such as light. Radiation is reflected off clouds and from surfaces like the planet’s ice sheets, and thermal radiation also regularly flows from Earth into space.
Those measurements are crucial for understanding the planet’s energy budget, or the amount of energy coming to Earth from the sun and the energy from Earth going into space.
“The flow of that energy is very important for all processes on Earth, including the atmospheric motions and winds that circulate weather systems and drive the ocean currents,” Peter Pilewskie, a scientist at CU Boulder’s Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics, said in a release. “This energy is behind everything that sustains life on Earth.”
Pilewskie has led the team that developed the Libera instrument for the past six years. In February, the team boxed up Libera and shipped it to a facility in Arizona run by the aerospace company Northrop Grumman. There, engineers will install Libera onto a satellite, which is slated for launch in 2027.
The instrument is about the size of a baby buffalo and will use detectors about the size of shirt buttons to record the full wavelength range of radiative energy leaving Earth. Libera will scan across the Earth about 30 million times during its 5-year mission, according to the release.
“The Libera team members have incredible passion for what they’re doing,” Brian Boyle, program manager for Libera at LASP, said in the release. “They’ve invented this new world class instrument, and it works exactly as designed.”
Libera will join a nearly 30-year tradition of unbroken measurements of Earth’s energy budget, following a NASA mission called the Clouds and the Earth’s Radiant Energy System, or CERES. Libera was given its name because in Roman mythology, Libera is the daughter of the goddess Ceres.
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