 I was so excited to receive a letter by the European Space Agency and the European Commission proposing that Sentinel-6A should be Sentinel-6 Mike Freilich. Having a satellite named after you is pretty remarkable. It's not something we do in Earth science very often. It's not only ESA, it's Europe who wishes to honor Mike Freilich. Mike Freilich has been instrumental in making Sentinel-6 a satellite that measures with very high precision sea level rise. The Sentinel missions are something that Mike was very involved in. It really epitomizes the role that Mike has played over the years as championing partnerships, championing collaborative investigation of the Earth. Names are reserved for the greats. You don't name after a satellite after somebody who just does the job. It's the second mission ever named after a person who's alive. It's a huge honor and I couldn't be more excited. Through this we want to pay tribute to a unique cooperation between the US and Europe and a unique personality, Mike Freilich. Dr. Mike Freilich is a world-renowned ocean scientist who after a successful career in academia came to NASA and for a dozen years let all of Earth science. It has really brought NASA back on the international stage. The partnerships that we forge are beyond a business transaction. They are about friendship and Mike did just that. Working with our international partners, working with our interagency partners. And Mike brought that community together in a way that was really unprecedented. Mike Freilich's legacy is being able to build the coalitions that are necessary for us to get as much understanding of our planet as possible. There is not another person more deserving of this honor than Mike Freilich. You know, when I first found out that Mike had cancer, I got a call from Thomas Erbuchen. So I called up the administrator and told him about it immediately. And he shared with me kind of what was going on and I asked him, I said, we've got to do something quickly. I want him to know that all the work he's done is extremely meaningful. Mike is a leader to all of us and a mentor and a person who has really advanced Earth science for the entire world. What is unique with Mike is his commitment to science and cooperation, but also his resilience and sense of humor. And I believe these are two facets of the same coin. It's unapologetically excellent. I am much better because of what I learned from him and because I had the opportunity to work with him. It's just been very rewarding, not just for me, but for the people in my organization to have had the privilege really of being his colleague in front. He was absolutely committed to dispassionately following the science. He had high standards for himself and everyone around him. Mike had a very big, very full red pen. Everybody was always afraid of that red pen. His pretty intense energy, one of the characteristics was the bouncy knee, which you'd never missed and it was always there and you could kind of gauge the way the medium is going by the pace of the bounce. I have a lot of hilarious emails on my smartphone exchange with Mike, which I keep as a treasure. And thank you, Mike, for being such a wonderful partner, a trusted partner who has built up this relationship over many years without you, Mike, or without Mike Freilich, this would not have happened. It is a no-brainer that we all came together and that they were able to really value out and allow the renaming of Sentinel-6A after Mike. When I got that letter, the first thing I did is, frankly, I called Mike and said, I received this letter. It would be an honor for all of us if we could name that spacecraft after you. Would you accept that? And he said, I'll be selfish, absolutely. I knew in 10th grade that I wanted to be a near-shore oceanographer. What has driven me is understanding how nature works. I got a call from Dr. Jack Kay here at NASA Headquarters asking me whether I might be interested in running the Earth Science Division here at NASA. We made dramatic progress in the last 13 years with our really substantive mission and analysis international collaborations to bring together people who have expertise in many different disciplines to work for long periods of time on problems that none of them individually could solve, but together could. Earth System Science is bigger than any particular agency. It's bigger than any single nation. It's bigger than any single continent. And I surely hope, because humanity requires it, that we make some significant progress in understanding.