Román explains how he ended up calibrating a brand-new satellite instrument straight out of college, after being trained as an engineer who crossed over into science. The work began in 2011 with the launch of the Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership satellite, a preparatory mission for the next generation of US weather satellites meant to track weather, ozone and surface radiation through the 2040s. He was given two years to verify the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite's day-night band, checking whether the instrument's data could be trusted at all. A question from a NASA intern about tracking holiday lights from space later pushed this calibration work toward studying nighttime human activity.
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Román describes his own background as an engineer who moved into science, which shaped his role as a bridge between instrument teams and science teams.
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The satellite began returning data in early 2012, shortly after its 2011 launch.
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0:50So, you've already noticed the photograph that was um that's over here. This is one of the first photos on the um Earth Observatory on the NASA website that sort of caught everyone's attention, this potential to study human activity at nighttime using satellite imagery. Um were you looking to do this or how did you even stumble upon this story? Tell me tell me what the the story is. Yeah. So, for the record, there's no NASA department dedicated to starring Hollywood lights from space. Yeah. Good. It did not not even today even though I think we should probably have one >> for sure. >> But
1:30>> we get an intern on that. >> I did. >> I did. And that's that's the wonderful thing about NASA entered. They had to ask amazing questions and that was one of the questions that came my to our office after we were doing what our job was which is we just started a new mission back in 2011 launched in 2011. data started coming in early 2012 called the Swami National Polar Orbiting Partnership which is our nation's next generation weather satellite large system took years to build and we
2:11needed a preparatory mission to make sure we're testing everything before we go into this new program that is going to be generating all sorts of measurements to track our weather to track all different trends, very important things like ozone, surface radiation, >> okay, >> through the 240s. So this was that at the moment the US were was looking under the hood of this new instrument
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