Early Friday morning, December 16th, SpaceX launched the Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) satellite for NASA and French space agency CNES that will survey nearly all the water on Earth. The mission includes contributions from the Canadian Space Agency and the UK Space Agency.

SWOT launched atop SpaceX's Falcon 9 from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California and will complete its primary mission over the next three years. According to NASA, the satellite's instruments will measure the height of water in freshwater bodies and the ocean on more than 90% of our planet's surface using instruments that will provide higher-resolution images than previous missions.

The collected data will help inform water equity and water management policy from local to national levels, add to the knowledge of Earth's water and energy cycles and help prepare cities, towns, and communities across the world for rising seas.

Photographer Pauline Acalin was on-site for Supercluster at Vandenberg to shoot the launch of the critical science mission.

“For freshwater, this will be a quantum leap in terms of our knowledge,” said Daniel Esteban-Fernandez, KaRIn instrument manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. "Researchers currently have good data on only a few thousand lakes around the world; SWOT will increase that number to at least a million."

According to JPL, KaRIn will measure the height of water in the ocean, “seeing” features like currents and eddies that are less than 13 miles (20 kilometers) across – up to 10 times smaller than those detectable with other sea-level satellites. It will also collect data on lakes and reservoirs larger than 15 acres (62,500 square meters) and rivers wider than 330 feet (100 meters) across.

said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson. “The climate crisis requires an all-hands-on-deck approach, and SWOT is the realization of a long-standing international partnership that will ultimately better equip communities so that they can face these challenges.”