Artist’s concept of Grace. Image credit: NASA/JPL
PASADENA, Calif. NASA Deputy Administrator Lori Garver and German Aerospace Center (DLR) Executive Board Chairman Johann-Dietrich Wörner signed an agreement Thursday during a bilateral meeting in Berlin to extend the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (Grace) mission through the end of its on-orbit life, which is expected in 2015. Launched in March 2002, Grace tracks changes in Earth's gravity field by noting minute changes in gravitational pull from local changes in Earth's mass. It does this by measuring changes in the distance between its two identical spacecraft to one-hundredth the width of a human hair. These spacecraft, developed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., are in the same orbit approximately 220 kilometers (137 miles) apart. "The extension of this successful cooperative mission demonstrates the strength of the NASA-DLR partnership and our commitment to continue working together in this very important area of Earth science," Garver said. NASA and DLR signed the original agreement in 1998.
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