Sonic boom rocks homes after launch
Satellite will study microscopic particles in the air and ocean
CAPE CANAVERAL — Delayed two days because of weather, a NASA satellite that will look at the tiniest parts of the air and ocean blasted off early Thursday and shook households in Central Florida when the rocket’s booster unleashed a massive sonic boom during its landing.
Years in the works, the Plankton, Aerosol Cloud Ocean Ecosystem (PACE) satellite was once on the chopping block of the Trump administration’s annual proposed NASA budgets as he sought to steer funds away from some climate-focused missions and shift money to deep-space efforts.
The project survived, though, and the nearly $950 million PACE satellite finally launched atop a Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station’s Space Launch Complex 40 at 1:33 a.m. It had been delayed from two attempts this week because of high winds.
The launch brought a loud
surprise of sonic booms to the Space Coast and surrounding counties as the booster for the flight made a return to Canaveral’s Landing Zone 1 instead of downrange in the Atlantic.
SpaceX had warned that residents of Brevard, Orange, Osceola, Indian River, Seminole,
Volusia, Polk, St. Lucie, and Okeechobee counties may hear one or more sonic booms depending on weather and other conditions.
The southerly trajectory to a polar orbit also meant the rocket hugged the Florida coast south from Cape Canaveral down
toward Palm Beach County before cutting across the Florida peninsula toward Cuba. It was the first NASA launch to a polar orbit from the Cape since the 1960s.
It was the eighth liftoff from the Space Coast in 2024 during a
year that could see as many as 111 launches.
The mission, which is being run out of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, has been in the works for nine years, although originally conceived more than 20 years ago, said Jeremy Werdell, NASA’s PACE project scientist.
“What we’re doing here with PACE is the search for the microscopic, mostly invisible universe in the sea and the sky in some degrees of land,” he said.
Its three instruments will look at the interactions of sunlight with clouds, a whole catalog of aerosol particulates in the air and phytoplankton, which form the base of the ocean food chain, in the sea.
Werdell, whose main focus is on the oceans, and Andy Sayer, a PACE atmospheric scientist, outlined why a space-based view of this information would be beneficial.
Werdell said there are beneficial types of phytoplankton, such as those that help fisheries, or those that help absorb carbon dioxide, and harmful types, such as those related to red tide or bluegreen algae that can cause fish kills and pollute the air.
“For the first time on a global scale … we’ll know where the harmful ones are, where the beneficial ones are, where the beneficial ones are moving to as the oceans are starting to change.”
The focus on clouds and aerosols will include industry-bred carbon emissions, sulfates and sea spray. Sayer said knowing where the various types are located can help inform public policy on air quality and human health, for instance. It can also potentially feed helpful information for agriculture or fishing.
The PACE mission, which has a planned 10-year lifespan once in orbit, was one of the first targeted by Trump beginning with the 2018 fiscal year budget, but Congress restored funding with the final budget allocations. It is now set to join more than two dozen Earth science satellites currently orbiting the planet.
“It has been a long strange trip, as they say,” Werdell said Sunday during a preflight press conference in response to the mission’s several near cancellations.