Mission to Planet Earth: NASA's Ambitious Plan to Study Our Home from Space
A Look Back at the Origins and Evolution of the EOS Project
In the late 1980s, environmental concerns such as climate change gained political momentum globally. Environmental disasters, like the Exxon Valdez oil spill, demonstrated the urgency of these problems. Recognising popular concern, George H.W. Bush, declared himself "the environmental president" in his 1988 campaign, and promised action on climate change. As president, he indeed played a pivotal role in enacting the Clean Air Act Amendment of 1990, which significantly advanced air pollution control, especially by reducing sulphur emissions from coal-burning plants. George H.W. Bush’s environmental legacy is multifaceted, marked by achievements, controversies, and challenges. While he took steps to address climate change, some within his administration remained sceptical. This posed challenges, particularly when it came to implementing more ambitious policies aimed at stabilising or reducing carbon emissions.
On the 20th anniversary of the Apollo 11 lunar mission,[1] on July 20, 1989, in a speech at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington D.C., George H.W. Bush set out his plans for a bold new programme of Lunar and Mars exploration. He proposed a 10-year Apollo-style plan, starting with the construction of the Space Station Freedom and ending with “a journey into tomorrow—a journey to another planet—a manned mission to Mars,” saying that it was humanity’s destiny to explore and America’s destiny to lead.” (Indeed, the vision of sending humans and colonising Mars is not merely a fleeting fancy or a product of our times, but a long-held dream that has endured for decades.) This plan was known as the Space Exploration Initiative (SEI)
In the 1980s, the United States civilian space program had fallen into a state of stagnation. But in February 1989, George H.W. Bush established the National Space Council (NSC) to revitalise the nation's space exploration dreams. Headed by Vice President Dan Quayle and consisting of key government officials, experts, and industry leaders, NSC’s primary objectives were to coordinate space-related policies across agencies, promote public-private collaboration, and advance space exploration and research.
However, the NSC's tenure was relatively short-lived, as it effectively ceased operation in 1993 during the Clinton administration. The Trump administration later revived it in 2017, with Vice President Mike Pence serving as the chair, reflecting the growing importance of space in national security, the economy, and scientific research. Today, its role continues to evolve, and it’s likely to become more important in the future, as space becomes increasingly contested and congested.
This same day, however, President Bush announced another initiative. A 25-year effort using a network of satellites to understand how the Earth’s atmosphere, seas and living creatures function as a global system. Costing the U.S. up to $30 billion and starting in 1991, it was going to create the first system of unmanned satellites able to observe, measure, and monitor the earth. [2] It was NASA’s Earth Observing System (EOS), an overambitious programme and the centrepiece of the agency’s Mission to Planet Earth - now officially called the Earth Science Enterprise (ESE). The mission was to use spacecraft and space technology to provide a comprehensive scientific study of the Earth’s living systems as viewed from space, how they were changing and to determine the causes and consequences of this change. At the time, it was envisioned as one of the nation’s most comprehensive and urgent scientific programmes.
EOS would be composed of a series of polar-orbiting (orbiting the Earth from pole to pole) and low inclination satellites (orbiting close to the equator), that once aloft would beam home a vast amount of data each day “on everything, from the flux of solar radiation into the atmosphere, to the growth of plankton beneath the ocean surface.” (Taubes, 1993) In addition, EOS included a data information system, and a science component, the Earth Observing System Data and Information System (EOSDIS) designed to manage the data these satellites would generate, and allow scientists worldwide to access and utilise it for various research purposes. Selby G. Tilford, director of NASA’s Earth Science and Applications division, called it “without any doubt the largest science programme the agency has ever undertaken.”
The Mission to Planet Earth
The concept of the Mission to Planet Earth (MTPE) predates the formal program and even the term itself by several years. The origins of MTPE can be traced back to 1976, when the Viking spacecraft arrived at Mars. During the Viking mission, the intended landing spot for the spacecraft was found to be unsuitable. This prompted NASA to call the nation’s leading Mars specialists for a three-week meeting, to address the issue. The meeting ultimately led to the selection of a safe landing area.
At the end of the meeting, one of the participant scientists, Michael McElroy of Harvard University, whose research initially focused on the origin and evolution of planets, but later shifted to the effects of human activity on the global environment, especially climate change, said something that he had already begun to tell other earth scientists: “You know, we've never done anything like this for the Earth."
McElroy's remarks struck a chord with several scientists at the conference. Perhaps they realised how little they knew about our home planet. In any case, it highlighted the need for a more thorough and systematic method to study and manage the Earth. This insight would eventually pave the way for the creation of the Mission to Planet Earth.
With the new name and an expanding bureaucratic-scientific coalition of potential users behind it, the Mission to Planet Earth was received well by politicians. It wasn’t long before it was portrayed as an essential element of the U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP), an interagency program that was first introduced under President Reagan and then revitalised by George W.H. Bush in 1990 as a presidential initiative. The U.S. Congress formally established the program under the Global Research Act (GCRA) of 1990, defining global change broadly to include any significant alterations in the Earth's climate, land productivity, oceans or other water resources, atmospheric chemistry, and ecosystems that could impact the planet's ability to support life. The Act specifically tasked the program to "assist the Nation and the world to assess, predict, and respond to human-induced and natural processes of global change." The launch of EOS-A was scheduled for 1996 and EOS-B would go up 2 years later.
It didn’t take long for the first problems and disagreements to surface, which, far from dying down, have only grown louder over time. While earth scientists were thrilled to get these new gadgets, at the same time, they worried that the existing space network (Landsat) would be left to decay. Best known were the problems with Landsats 4 and 5, the civilian land scanners that were almost turned off in 1989 because of the lack of funds. Plans to replace the ageing ozone monitor on NIMBUS-7, the satellite that famously captured the view of the ozone hole, were also uncertain. NASA was exploring the possibility of transporting a replacement instrument in a Soviet vehicle. Critics argued that in planning EOS, NASA was committing itself to a grandiose space programme that would gather huge amounts of undigestible data. Furthermore, they were concerned that the enormous cost of EOS would inevitably squeeze out funding for those, perhaps more worthy, climate monitoring programmes.
An animated view of NASA's Earth observing fleet, as it looks today. This 30 second visualization is updated once per day. Time shown in UTC. Source: NASA SVS | Earth Observing Fleet
Hansen vs The World
Scientists were also concerned about another issue. While their 21st-century counterparts would benefit from a wealth of detailed data on tropical rain, ozone in the upper atmosphere, and forest growth (as indeed has been the case), scientists in the 1990s would have to do with limited and static resources. Before pouring money into flashy new hardware, they argued, the government should shore up basic research and help the existing earth-monitoring systems, especially those with archives that could be used presently in climate research.
The scientist who had gone public with criticisms of NASA’s priorities- and who thought the agency was “mad with me” for doing so, was James Hansen, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies at Columbia University in New York. (Kerr, 1989) Just a year before, on June 23, 1988, Hansen made the deadlines of virtually every major newspaper with his testimony in Congress. Washington, D.C., recorded a temperature of 1010F (380C) which was one of the highest on record for that date.
On that day, Hansen made three statements. First, he was “99 percent confident” that the earth was getting warmer. Second, with a high degree of confidence, we could associate the warming and the greenhouse effect. And third, “in their climate models, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, there was already a noticeable increase in the frequency of drought.”
“We are loading the climate dice,” Hansen said, suggesting that while variability in weather still exists, the emissions of greenhouse gases, were increasing the likelihood of extreme weather events, such as heatwaves and droughts.
One year after his testimony, and despite all the criticism, Hanssen stated that he “wouldn’t change any of these.". In a 1989 letter to the journal Issues in Science and Technology, Hansen argued that the development of the Earth Observing System (EOS) would take too long to produce timely results. While he acknowledged the necessity of EOS, he maintained that the years-long development process could not keep up with the urgent issue of global warming.
In contrast to the lengthy development process of EOS, Hansen advocated for a more practical solution: “a pair of small, inexpensive satellites,” which he called Climsat. They could be placed in orbit much sooner than the EOS project and “help answer pressing questions about projected warming trends.” They could be built, launched, and operated for 5 years for a total of $350 million. Additionally, replacement satellites could then be sent up for as little as $40 million each
Despite the support from other prominent scientists, NASA rejected Hansen’s proposal, arguing that with EOS, “NASA doing most of what Hansen recommended anyway,”- albeit on a longer timeline. Despite the discussions, commitments and efforts to introduce and fund a smaller climate satellite program, the decision had been made. As the science writer Gary Taubes observed in a February 1993 article published in the journal Science, “in space-based climate monitoring, EOS is the only game in town.”
One of the key advocates for the Earth Observing System (EOS) project was the then-Senator Al Gore. At that time, Gore held an influential position as the head of the Senate Subcommittee on Space, Science and Technology, and was widely recognised as the leading "Environmental Senator" in the United States.
Gore was highly critical of President George W. Bush's Moon-Mars mission. He described it as a "day-dream," drawing a parallel to the fantastical nature of the "Star Wars" films. He warned that the project could turn into a "George Lucas movie," implying that it lacked a realistic and feasible plan for implementation. He further expressed concerns about the potential diversion of resources from addressing Earth's pressing environmental problems. He feared that the significant financial and technological investments required for the Moon-Mars mission could come at the expense of critical initiatives focused on understanding and mitigating climate change and other environmental challenges. This position highlighted the tension between investing in space exploration and addressing immediate environmental challenges, a debate that persists in various forms to this day.
Could a smaller satellite system, like the one proposed by James Hansen and existing observing projects such as Landsat, as well as ocean and weather monitors run by NOAA, have provided better support for climate change research and policy action? Could have accelerated climate change research and climate policy?
On the one hand, data from projects such as Landsat and NOAA's monitoring networks may have provided scientists with earlier and more detailed insights into the unfolding climate crisis. This might have allowed them to more effectively communicate climate science and the effects of climate change to the public, as well as present a more persuasive argument to policymakers, potentially resulting in faster action.
However, the relationship between scientific evidence, political will, and policy outcomes is infamously complex. Even with earlier and stronger evidence, it’s not guaranteed that politicians and decision-makers would have responded more urgently. Entrenched interests, ideological divides, and other sociopolitical factors often impede progress, even in the face of strong scientific consensus. Ultimately, it is difficult to say with certainty whether a smaller, more targeted satellite system would have made a decisive difference.
In December 1999, EOS launched Terra, its first satellite. Its data has been crucial in studies on pollution, forest fires, and land use changes. EOS remains a key part of NASA’s Earth Science Division and a cornerstone in the study of Earth’s climate and global environmental changes. It makes a significant contribution to our understanding of Earth's climate and the complex interactions between the Earth's land, atmosphere, oceans, and biosphere.
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Footnotes:
[1] On July 16, 1969, Apollo 11 launched from Cape Kennedy, carrying Armstrong, Aldrin, and Command Module Pilot Michael Collins. On July 20, 1969, Armstrong’s iconic words echoed across the world as he stepped onto the moon’s surface: “One small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.”
[2] Perhaps as much as $25 billion has been spent on until 2003. The figure of $25 billion is cited by Roger Pielke Jr and Daniel Sarawitz, “Research as Action on Climate Change” Space News, (January 6, 2003) However, the precise number is difficult to compute owing to what is included or excluded.