Lift-off! SWOT launches a new era of satellite oceanography

NASA-CNES SWOT (Surface Water and Ocean Topography) is Go!

After decades of planning and preparations, SWOT took off aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg Space Force Base on a cold clear morning on 16 December 2022.

After a checkout of the satellite's health and functional behaviour, the operations team then proceeded to deploy the KaRIn interferometric radar antennas. This process, which occurs over four days, involved unfolding the mast, then moving the mast into flight position and then unfolding the antenna’s at the tip of each mast. You can watch an animation of the deployment here.

Over the coming months, the operations team will adjust the orientation of the satellite and commence payload turn-on in advance of the calibration and validation and fast-sampling phases of the mission. The nominal fast-sampling phase is now scheduled for April-June 2023 with the first "pre-validated" SWOT data anticipated to become available late September or early October.

The SWOT mission brings together two communities focused on a better understanding of the world's oceans and its terrestrial surface waters. U.S. and French oceanographers and hydrologists and international partners have joined forces to develop this satellite mission to make the first global survey of Earth's surface water, observe the fine details of the ocean's surface topography, and measure how water bodies change over time.

SWOT is being jointly developed by NASA and Centre National D'Etudes Spatiales (CNES) with contributions from the Canadian Space Agency (CSA) and United Kingdom Space Agency.

In addition, the SWOT mission was featured in the most recent issue of Australia in Space magazine (pages 40 to 42).