Artist’s impression of Jason-2 in orbit
Designed for a three-to-five-year mission, the joint U.S./European Ocean Surface Topography Mission (OSTM) on the Jason-2 satellite has now made more than 47,000 trips around our home planet, measuring sea level change across the globe, observing ocean currents, studying climate phenomena such as El Nino and La Nina, and monitoring the long-term rise in global mean sea level. In January 2016, it was joined in orbit by its follow-on mission, Jason-3. In July 2017, Jason-2 began a new science mission when it was manoeuvred into a slightly lower orbit. In this new orbit, Jason-2 is collecting data along a series of very closely spaced ground tracks, 8km apart. It will take just over a year for Jason-2 to complete one cycle of these new ground tracks, which provide a very accurate and high-resolution estimate of the mean sea surface. The pull of gravity from underwater mountains and other features of the sea floor helps to shape the mean sea surface. These new surface measurements are already being used by scientists to improve maps of the shape and depth of the sea floor, resolving many previously unknown seamounts and other geological features on the ocean bottom.
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