Editorial: Offloading Earth Science

To hear some NASA officials tell it, the U.S. National Polar-orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite System (NPOESS) platform can do it all. Not only can it host payloads that have been flying on separate civilian and military weather satellites since the early years of the space age, but it also can be calibrated precisely enough to provide research-quality climate data, accommodate a land imaging sensor and even carry a greenhouse-gas monitoring instrument that previously was supposed to fly on a mission dubbed Glory.