Follow GRACE through the years with some selected highlights of the mission. GRACE is a joint NASA-German Aerospace Center endeavor.
2002 - JPL Team
You can't talk about a mission without meeting some of the people that make it happen.
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JPL GRACE Team circa 2002.
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2002 - From Russia with love
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Members of the GRACE team prepare for launch on site in Plesetsk, Russia. From left; JPLers Phil Morton, Garth Franklin, Jennifer Rocca, and Charlie Dunn, along with colleagues from Astrium. See GRACE launch preparations..
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2002 - GRACE launches
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Both GRACE satellites were launched simultaneously with a ROCKOT launch vehicle from Plesetsk/Russia on March 17, 2002. The GRACE orbit is almost polar (i=89.0°) and near circular (e<0.005) and started with an initial altitude of 500 km. The anticipated lifetime for scientific operations was 5 years. The mission is still producing highly precise measurements of Earth's gravity field over 9 years later. Click here (QuickTime, 5.62 MB) to view the GRACE launch and a simulation of the release of the satellites from the fairing.
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2003 - Earth's gravity field
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An early image released from GRACE graphically illustrates the sensitivity of the measurement to changes in the distance between the mission's twin spacecraft in response to changes in Earth's gravity.
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2004 - CHAMP/GRACE science
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An early joint GRACE and CHAMP science team meeting. See 2004 CHAMP-GRACE meeting for more photos and information.
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2005 - Amazon Basin seasonal water changes
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GRACE monitors month-to-month variations in water flowing through the Amazon Basin by measuring its effects on gravity. Orange, red and pink show where gravity is higher than average. Green, blue and purple show where gravity is lower than average. See GRACE Amazon hydrology.
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2006 - Ice mass loss on Greenland revealed by GRACE
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This figure shows the ice mass loss in Antarctica as observed by Grace over the period 2002-2005 (see browse image) measured in cubic kilometers per year. The ice mass loss observed contributes about 0.4 millimeters (.016 inches) per year to global sea level rise. Image credit: University of Colorado. Click here for more information.
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2006 - GRACE reveals gravity changes from Sumatran earthquake
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This figure is a composite image from GRACE satellite data showing the gravity changes for the Sumatra-Andaman earthquake in December 2004. (Image courtesy of Shin-Chan Han, Ohio State University). Click here for the JPL release and here for a related Science Daily story.
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2007 - GRACE Graces Discover Magazine
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March 2007. The pair of GRACE satellites map subtle variations in Earth’s gravitational field, revealing secret craters, undersea mountains, and the impact of climate change. Click here for the Discover Magazine article.
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2008 - Water storage anomalies in the Mississippi Basin
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The combination of GRACE and in--situ data, a numerical hydrologic model, and the mathematical technique of 'data assimilation' permits to separate the total water content observed by GRACE into the various vertical components. Click here for more information.
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2009 - Groundwater loss in northwest India
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GRACE observes a major loss of groundwater in NW India (Rodell, Velicogna and Famiglietti, 2009, Nature). The map shows the region over which the spatial average is taken, and the curves show the total water content of the soil, as well as its components (derived using a numerical hydrologic model). Click here for more information, and here for a related story.
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2010 - GRACE helps measure impacts of climate change
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Measurements on Earth's ice-covered regions reveal the magnitude of ice mass decline since 2002. Click here for more information.
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2011 - GRACE finds polar ice adding more to rising seas
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Total ice sheet mass balance between 1992 and 2009, as measured for Greenland (top), Antarctica (middle) and the cumulative sum of both ice sheets (bottom), in gigatonnes per year, as measured by the two different methods used by the researchers: the mass budget method (solid black circles) and time-variable gravity measurements from the NASA/German Aerospace Center’s Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (Grace) satellites (solid red triangles). Image credit: NASA/JPL-UC Irvine-Utrecht University-National Center for Atmospheric Research. Click here for the JPL press release.
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