Dr.Bill Baker Email & Phone Number

Dr.Bill Baker is a Director at Dryden Flight Research Ctr at Dryden Flight Research Ctr.

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  Director

  Dryden Flight Research Ctr

  Oct 1999 - Present - Houston, Texas Area

  ISS-RapidScat will follow the February launch of the Global Precipitation Measurement Core Observatory, a joint mission with the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency and the July launch of the Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2.Most satellite missions require weeks or even months to produce data of the quality that we seem to be getting from the first few days of RapidScat,” said RapidScat Project Scientist Ernesto Rodriguez of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California, which built and manages the mission. “We have been very lucky that within the first days of operations we have already been able to observe a developing tropical cyclone“The quality of these data reflect the level of testing and preparation that the team has put in prior to launch,” Rodriguez said.RapidScat is the first science payload to be robotically assembled in space since the space station itself. It is an autonomous payload that requires no interaction from space station astronauts.The instrument will boost global monitoring of ocean winds for improved weather and marine forecasting, including hurricane monitoring, as well as climate studies.From the unique vantage point of the space station, this space-based scatterometer instrument will use radar pulses reflected from the ocean’s surface from different angles to calculate ocean surface wind speeds and directions.The ISS-RapidScat instrument is a speedy an cost-effective replacement for NASA’s former QuikScat Earth satellite, which monitored ocean winds to provide essential measurements used in weather predictions, including hurricane monitoring.