 Okay, I'm NASA head co-authors in Washington, and I'm going to do a quick run-through of how we look at the Earth from space and say some things a little bit about how we see what we see and what it is that the Earth does, what we're doing to the Earth, how the Earth is responding, and do a small subset of what we can do all in 15 minutes to make sure that we have – stay on time for the next speaker. So I like to start out by showing the fleet that we have. This is the fleet of our research satellites that doesn't include the satellites of our operational partners in the U.S. or our international partners, although a fair number of the things that we have involve international and domestic partnership contributions. What you see are the orbits and the sense of – well, it starts out looking like a complicated picture. There's a few things to notice of that. One is that the new global extent that one has, that means that really what space gives us is for the first time in human history essentially is equivalent quality data anywhere in the world so that we can really look at all parts of the Earth, including ones that are otherwise hard to observe – open oceans, ice sheets, boreal forests, tropical forests, developing countries. A few other things to see is that at first it may look like this jumbled mass of the boiling vat of spaghetti or something, but there's an art and a science to it where the orbits tend to be chosen so that you can address the phenomenon. A lot of the satellites that we use are in polar synchronic orbit, so they're pulled to pole essentially over each pole 15 or so times a day. Some are in mid-inclination orbits. If you're really focused on tropical things or subtropical things, then that way you're not spending your time over areas where you don't have the phenomena that you're looking for. Some of the things are off by their lonesome, and some are flying in close proximity with others. The eight Cygnus satellites, the two GRACE follow-on satellites, you've got what's been virtual constellations, the A-train, which is now sort of like an A-train and a C-train and a variety of other things. But the idea is you pick your approach, you pick your technique, you pick your problem, and you match up the science to what you're trying to do. A couple other things to remember. Most of these satellites are moving around seven kilometers a second, orbiting the Earth every hundred minutes or so. And some of them have been around quite long. The oldest ones that we show here, 1999, so that means if they were people, they'd be well past the drinking age. And some of the more recent ones are just from 2021. But it's a tribute to the engineering skills that the satellites can last as long as they do work in the harsh space environment. And for some of the ones that have been in constellations, fly safely together. And just a reminder, sometimes we think it's easy. It's not. But it's this ability to marry science, engineering, and technology that lets us do the things that we're going to do and that I'm going to show you. This is the Earth Biosphere. And so you can see biosphere on land, biosphere in the ocean, 20 years of data from especially MOTIS. But you can get a sense of sort of what one thinks about the living Earth, the green forests and brown deserts and the white areas that are covered by snow and then the coast, the regions of high biological productivity. So this is where, at the surface, there's a mission and uptake of carbon that contributes to the carbon that we see in the atmosphere. So this is sort of, rather this is nature doing its thing, not exactly. Humans influence nature and vice versa. But if you look at night, you can see something that's very human influence. This is from the Vier's instrument, or assuming NPP. And when the lights are on at night, that's where there's a lot of us and you've got industrial capability. And because literally, if you don't have that capability, the lights don't stay on at night. And this gives you a very good idea of human geography because you can see where we've got people, where we've got industry, how so much of the planet is dark at night because there's either no people or no power. And if you look in detail, you can really get a sense of where people are living and how people are living and even aspects of sort of political boundaries you can see. The difference between India and China, the difference between South Korea and North Korea, there's places you can look at where fishing is taking place, because the fishing boats may have lights at night. So this is, because where you see the people and the industry, that's where we're impacting the planet. And speaking of impacting the planet, there's probably no better way of one of the great ways of thinking about that is you look at urbanization and see over a period of decades. This is Las Vegas, growing over a period of decades from Landsat data. And you can just see this. Mash up on area, move out. And the airport is always a good marker and thanks to the great visualizes, you can sort of go back in time and realize just how much this is changing. It's a stark reminder of something that we already know. We are changing the face of the earth in ways that are completely visible from space and that matter. It's not just a curiosity because this contributes to urban heat island formation and changes, you know, if and when it rains, what happens to the rain if it falls on concrete as opposed to something else. So there's a lot of things that we learn about by having these data. So I'm showing Las Vegas here and this is not as many time periods, but this is the Shanghai area in China and invariably I'm going to block some things. So if I stand there, I block the dates, which are kind of important. But you can see how Shanghai has changed enormously in the period of observation. And I talked about equivalent quality data anywhere. And the idea is I showed Las Vegas, but I can show something very similar for Shanghai and see how we are changing the face of the planet. So these are active fires from the VIRS instrument and goes through 2021. So you can see where fires are taking place as a measure of the fire radiative power. But because it covers a period of time, you can see how many fires there are, how they move seasonally, and see, you know, like the difference between where you've got fires more in southern Africa, where you've got them in central Africa, see the seasons, where you've got lightning ones, and which ones to do the human activity. So this is a good way of being able to see some of the things that nature does, some of the things that humans do, and recognize that fire doesn't just burn things on the ground, it puts things into the atmosphere. And when you start trying to think about what are the impacts, this ability to relate what we see at the surface to what goes on in the atmosphere and look at sort of mutually reinforcing, forcing in response an important part of what we do. And this is another example of, without the space-based viewpoint, it's very hard to, you know, contemplate how you could get the continuing situational awareness globally of what's going on with the planet. So this is atmospheric carbon, both CO2 and carbon monoxide. It's an observationally informed model. And so the CO2 would be colored, the carbon monoxide, so it goes from black to white. But you can see the hemispheric patterns. You can see seasonal patterns. You note that for CO2, the variations are relatively small. It's, you know, plus or minus a couple of percent, whereas for CO it's 100, plus or minus 100% for the CO2. The variations are sort of small variations against a big background. The carbon monoxide is from bigger variations against a smaller background. And you can see where point sources make a difference, the role that fires play, the role that industry plays. And when you start combining it with things like the fires that I showed, the only informed model that's around the world with aerosols from the global modeling and assimilation office that it gathered. So it shows the distribution of aerosols as they move. It recognizes the different kinds of aerosols because unlike the trace gases where, to a good approximation, you've seen one of those on molecule, you've seen them all. It's not true. There's isotopes, I know. But for aerosols, it's very, very different. That they have different sources. Some are more natural, like sea salt. Some have sort of mixed human and natural sources like fires. Some are entirely human if it's fossil fuel combustion. So it's color-coded. You can see how complex the picture is. You can see how global it is. The stuff that's emitted in one part of the atmosphere can be transported within days. Of course, the ocean potentially to impact other parts of the atmosphere. They interact with each other. And it's just really pretty, too. The scientific visualization studio at Goddard does all of these things. And so it's great science. And it's just really, really attractive to look at. So those are some of the things about the Earth responding. This is from the Grayson-Gray's following on satellites. It shows the loss of ice mass in Greenland and in Darlika. You can see there's decreases, but little seasonal things. You can get a sense of where the ice is being lost, so the losing it around the edge in Greenland actually gaining a little in the middle. You can see in Darlika it's a very localized picture. We also have some information from radar and models about how the ice flows. But this is another example of what the space-based vantage point does, because if you were to think about it, I mean, in some sense it's like we're weighing Greenland and weighing in Darlika, measuring ice mass. And without that satellite vantage point, it's almost impossible to comprehend how you would be able to do these kinds of things. And the GRACE missions were partnerships with Germany. It's actually based on measuring gravitational changes, because what would change the gravitational pull? It's the mass below you, which relates to water. So this is a great example of clever people figuring out how to do something that's not at all intuitive than people making it work scientifically, technologically, programmatically, and really being able to learn some things about the most rapidly changing parts of the Earth. They're really important. Because remember, today's ice sheet loss also turns into not so much tomorrow, but today's sea level rise as well. So these are really important observations. And then something else that one can look at from the passive microwave is the minimum extent of sea ice in the Arctic. So this shows where the minimum is in September as a function of time. And this record's been around for a long time. And you can see it's mostly downward. It's not at all monotonic. And a couple of things that might constitute as surprises. 2007 was a big drop. Then sort of came back. 2012 was another big drop. But again, this is the sort of thing that, with that satellite, so it would be very hard to contemplate how one would look at this, but realize this is real. And this is just the minimum aerial extent. This isn't showing the thickness changes that you can use for volume changes, which actually are bigger, but the sense that there's times of the year that historically would be covered by ice in the Arctic. They're not covered at that time at those times anymore. So they're talking Northwest Passage kind of opening up, which brings challenges and opportunities to us all. And then something else is atmospheric ozone. This is where I'll close. We've been doing ozone observations for decades, really. The Antarctic ozone hole was discovered in the mid-80s. And the Montreal Protocol was passed and enacted and strengthened multiple times so that one can see that this continental scale phenomenon has stopped growing, has begun recovering. And sort of it's still there, but the expectation is thanks to the nations of the world getting together, coming up with a policy, enacting it, paying attention to it, strengthening it as they need to, expanding it to include more compounds that one can realistically look ahead to the end of the ozone hole. And if we hadn't done this, we'd be looking at much greater ozone depletion, not just in the poles. And oh, by the way, since CFCs are significant radiative forcing gases, the Montreal Protocol not just protected ozone, but really limited what would have otherwise been a really important radiative forcing agent. So again, this idea that the nations of the world get together and take action, we can see it in the ways that we see the environment responding. We see it in surface chlorine measurements. We see it in ground-based column measurements. We see it in the chlorine in the top of the stratosphere. So with that, I've probably spent too much time talking and turned it over to our next speaker, because Renee Weber from NASA Marshall. Thanks, Jack. Hi, everyone. My name is Renee Weber. And I'm here to talk about the Artemis mission and, in particular, doing science at the South Pole of the Moon. So if you're not already familiar with the Artemis mission, that is the agency's human exploration program, which aims to return humans to the moon in the 21st century. Artemis is the name of Apollo's sister in mythology. And it's very fitting, since Artemis will send the first woman and the first person of color to the moon. So this first visualization is just to kind of familiarize you with the moon, if I'm sure all of you have gone outside at night and looked up at the moon in the night sky. So let me try to explain some of the things that are going on here. First of all, you see the illumination cycle. The moon is tidally locked to the Earth, which means that we always see the same face. The near side is the face toward the faces near the Earth, and then the far side is the face that faces away. And the illumination cycle is two weeks of daylight and two weeks of nighttime. So basically, we have illumination where we see the terminator coming across, and then it's going to circle around. And then we also have what we call the librations. And so we're not always seeing exactly the same 50% of the near side of the moon. And that is because the moon's rotation rate is not exactly equal to its revolution rate. And so we're actually seeing close to about 57% of the moon, so that sometimes the leading edge is ahead, and then sometimes it's behind. And so that's why we see these wobbles. That's called the libration. And that also occurs on this two weeks on, two weeks off cycle. And then lastly, you'll also notice the perigee apogee cycle. So the moon's orbit around the Earth is not perfectly circular. So sometimes it's a little bit closer, and sometimes it's a little bit farther away. And that amounts to about a 14% difference in the apparent size of the moon in the sky. So this illumination cycle is the part that's really important when I shift to talking about Artemis. But first I'm going to talk about Apollo. So most of the Apollo missions, as you can see, were roughly close to the moon's equator. And so that's where that two week day-night cycle is the strongest. And so when you think about actually doing field geology on the moon, worrying about the sun isn't really something that was a part of those missions. The way that the missions were architectured was essentially that the lander would approach the moon very close to or just after sun rise. And then landers would land and the humans would get out and they would do all of their amazing field geology and deploy experiments and never really have to think about, is it going to get dark out? Because they had two weeks, although the missions didn't last that long, to do the science. And so here we have Jack Schmidt and Gene Cernan. And they are just gathering samples, which of course are very valuable to help us as lunar scientists understand the history of the moon. And yeah, the field science is something that is obviously of great importance. It's one of the three pillars of the human exploration program. It's sort of the reason why we're going to the moon is to learn about the moon and to bring samples back. And when we transition from how we thought about doing that during Apollo to how we will do that during Artemis, the illumination is something that we have to focus strongly on. And so this next animation is actually going to take us away from the equator down to the pole, to the south pole in particular. This is the region that the agency has highlighted as a target for its human exploration program, in part because of the known presence of volatiles, in particular, water ice. This is a very important resource. And it's also very important scientifically just to help us understand the distribution of volatiles in the solar system. And so now we're going to zoom in on the rim of Shackleton crater, which is where the south pole actually falls geographically on the moon. And then it starts to step through that same illumination day-night cycle. And you can see that it is a lot different. I think I skipped a video. We go back one. Yeah. And essentially what is happening is the sun is just like on Earth. As you go towards the poles, as you go up in latitude, the sun is going to be at a very low angle. And so you'll have a lot of shadows. The sun is also going to appear to move around 360 degrees in the sky. And so there will be both regions that are more persistently illuminated and also regions that are permanently shadowed. And so you have this very low illumination angle. You have a changing illumination angle. You have regions that are very dark and very cold, which will be a challenge technologically to go to. But it's also very scientifically interesting to go there. So these are some of the challenges that we'll face as we try to explore these regions. Yes, so the next chart is going to talk about the actual Artemis III candidate landing mission. So Artemis I, for those of you following along, is the mission that just recently launched and an Orion capsule, which splashed down in the Pacific just this past weekend, a very successful mission. And Artemis III will be the first mission that actually lands humans on the moon with the SpaceX Starship Human Landing System vehicle. And this video is highlighting the 13 candidate landing regions that NASA has identified where the Starship will potentially land. And so each one of these regions was selected first and foremost for safety reasons. So we have to be able to ensure the safety of the lander. And so they take into account things like the slope and the presence of boulders or other potential landing hazards. Illumination itself plays a big part into site availability because there are solar panels that we have to make sure are being illuminated. And then on top of that, we also pick regions that provide access to a lot of geologic diversity so that we are sort of maximizing the amount of science that we can do and also are just kind of, you know, cool places. Like technology challenging, like I mentioned before, access to permanently shadowed regions or other regions of scientific interest. So about two years ago now, NASA did charter a science definition team whose job was to kind of help prioritize the types of scientific investigations that will eventually be done at one of these 13 landing regions, including sample return and analysis, field geology and the deployment of scientific instruments that will remain on the surface after the crew depart. So the next video is showing the actual point of view as if you were standing on the South Pole. So this is a visualization that's done using data from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. And so essentially what you're seeing is the apparent movement of the Earth and the Sun from a point of view, I think, on the rim of Shackleton. And so as I mentioned, you know, the Sun just kind of is zooming around you. Obviously, this is really sped up. The Earth appears upside down from the point of view of someone standing on the South Pole. And so if you think that it looks weird, that's why. And also the Earth doesn't really move around a whole lot, like I mentioned before, about the way that the Moon is tidally locked to the Earth. So that you'll essentially always just kind of see it in roughly the same spot in the sky, kind of wobbling around a little bit. So again, just call attention to, oh, and then also if you're there at just the right time, you can also witness an eclipse on the Moon. So as the animation progresses, you'll see again these changing illumination conditions, very deep shadows. Sometimes you can see the shadow of nearby topography, crossing over the region where you're standing. And so these are all things that mission planners will very much have to take into consideration when they're trying to figure out, how do we do science? You know, when you do field work on the Earth, and even when you do field work on the Moon during the Apollo missions, you know, thinking about where the Sun was gonna be wasn't necessarily something that we had to take into account. But as we start to work towards establishing a sustained human presence on the Moon and the Artemis Basecamp, you know, lighting solutions will have to be part of this architecture. And power solutions, so I mentioned earlier that there are regions that are approximately persistently illuminated. You may have heard the phrase, peaks of eternal light, which isn't totally true. There aren't any areas near the poles that are 100% illuminated all of the time. But there are regions that are up to, you know, approximately 70% illuminated. And if you're able to go a few meters up above the surface, then you can get it even higher than that, up to 80 or maybe even 90%. And so you can see in this artist's rendition of a future Artemis Basecamp, you know, potentially having like really tall solar panels that made it so that you can reach that illumination that's maybe not influenced by shadows from nearby topography are one way that we can provide power during a sustained human mission. So that's the end of my presentation. And I'll just wrap up by saying, obviously, we're all very excited about the agency's return to the Moon and very much looking forward to the science that we'll be able to bring back from this complex and varied terrain. Thank you. I guess I finished a little early, so I can answer questions if anyone has any. All right, thanks. Oh, Jim has a question. Hey, Jim. So Artemis II will be very similar to the Artemis I, except there will be crew on board. So it's essentially a crew demo mission similar to some of the earlier Apollo missions where we step through all of the different phases of the mission with crew, actually crew on board, except for the part where we go down to the surface of the Moon. So they will be crew on Orion and they will go out to the Moon and they will go around the Moon and they will come back and they'll splash down. There just won't be any actual surface mission.