Sharon Kleyne Discusses Collaborative Space Mission To Weigh Earth's Water

USA - English

• USA - English

GRANTS PASS, Ore., April 13, 2019 /PRNewswire-PRWeb/ -- "At this very moment," says Sharon Kleyne, "a joint US-German mission is underway to weigh earth's water." Two ships, the Grace satellites, have launched into orbit to replace a pair of defunct spacecraft that stopped working last year. The Grace satellites, Kleyne explains, will sense minuscule variations in the pull of gravity as they orbit earth. "These variations are the result of movements in mass," says Kleyne.

Kleyne, founder and research director of Bio-Logic Aqua® Research/Water Life Science®, says that these variations could signal the swelling of the land after extensive rains. Or they could mean that ice is draining from earth's poles as it melts in a fast-warming climate. The Grace satellites were successfully launched on May 22nd aboard a SpaceX rocket from the Vandenberg Air Force base in California.

Grace, Kleyne explains, is an acronym for Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment. The original program ran from 2002 to 2017 and has been called a transformative information-gathering program. Maintaining this program, Kleyne says, is a top priority for NASA. This new mission once again relies to a great extent on European expertise, especially from the German Research Centre for Geosciences (GFZ). The satellites were assembled by Europe's largest space company, Airbus, at its factory in Friedrichshafen.

Kleyne, host of the nationally syndicated radio program, The Sharon Kleyne Hour Power of Water, Nature's Pharma®/Water Life Science® & Your Health sponsored by Nature's Tears® EyeMist® on VoiceAmerica and World Talk Radio, explains how the Grace satellites actually perform. The first satellite lurches and drags through earth's uneven gravity field while the second follows 220km behind. As it does so, the second satellite measures changes in their separation to the nearest micron (a thousandth of a millimeter). Professor Frank Flechtner, the Grace-FO project manager at GFC, says "that is about a tenth of the width of a human hair over the distance between Los Angeles and San Diego".

Kleyne adds that the Grace satellites are especially brilliant at sensing huge changes in earth's hydrological cycle. As ice mass at the poles continues to melt at an alarming pace, GRACE can and does monitor the global rise of sea levels, which of course threatens many communities and businesses. For instance, Antarctica is losing 120 billion tons of ice a year; Greenland is losing 280 billion tons of ice a year. This massive ice loss will have severe global consequences, says Kleyne.

Kleyne shares that the current GRACE mission should be able to gather data for five years at a cost of 520 million dollars. It is hoped that the next stage of this project will involve more EU states as U.S. participation becomes increasingly uncertain. Still, Kleyne believes that the research data collected by GRACE reinforces the need to adopt Nature's Pharma®/Water Life Science®, the new lifestyle that teaches a more profound awareness of the water issues that face humanity and encourages a more individual, proactive involvement in health care.

SOURCE Sharon Kleyne