You can watch the launch live here at Space.com courtesy of NASA, or directly via the space agency. Coverage will begin at 11:30 p.m. EDT on Sunday (Nov. 16; 0430 GMT on Nov. 17).<\/p>\n
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The Copernicus Sentinel-6B ocean-monitoring satellite is prepped for launch in California. (Image credit: USSF 30th Space Wing)<\/p>\n
Sentinel-6B is part of the European Union’s Copernicus<\/a> Earth-observing program. The new satellite will measure sea surface heights around the globe with great accuracy, continuing the work of its predecessor, Sentinel 6 Michael Frelich<\/a>, which launched atop a Falcon 9 in November 2020.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n “Monitoring sea-level rise is high on the global agenda,” European Space Agency<\/a> (ESA) officials wrote in a Sentinel-6B mission description<\/a>.<\/p>\n “In the past 25 years, the average height of the world’s oceans has risen by almost 10 cm [4 inches], according to data from Copernicus,” they added. “The Copernicus Sentinel-6 mission has become the gold standard reference mission to monitor and record this key consequence of climate change<\/a>.”<\/p>\n Sentinel-6B will do this work using a radar altimeter instrument developed by ESA. The satellite also carries a NASA-provided microwave radiometer, which will determine atmospheric water content, allowing for more accurate interpretation of the altimeter’s results.<\/p>\n During its first year of observations, Sentinel-6B will work with Sentinel 6 Michael Frelich, “enabling greater accuracy with precise cross-calibration between the two instruments,” ESA officials wrote about the mission, which is a collaboration among the European Commission, ESA, NASA, Eumetsat, and the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, with support from the French space agency CNES.<\/p>\n If all goes according to plan on Monday morning, the Falcon 9’s upper stage will deploy Sentinel-6B about 57 minutes after liftoff. The 3,175-pound (1,440 kilograms) satellite will then make its way to its science orbit, which lies 830 miles (1,336 kilometers) above Earth.<\/p>\n The Falcon 9’s first stage, meanwhile, will come back to Vandenberg for a landing about nine minutes after liftoff. It will be the third flight for this particular booster; its previous two missions lofted batches of SpaceX<\/a>‘s Starlink broadband satellites, according to the company<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"SpaceX will launch an advanced ocean-mapping satellite from California early Monday morning (Nov. 17), and you can watch…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":209237,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[90,416,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-266459","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-space","8":"tag-science","9":"tag-space","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom","12":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/266459","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=266459"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/266459\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/209237"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=266459"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=266459"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=266459"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}