A photo from the NASA PACE Ocean Sciences gallery.
The Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud, ocean Ecosystem mission is a satellite observatory created by Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) which contains an Ocean Color Instrument (OCI), to measure the color of the ocean from ultraviolet to shortwave infrared, as well as two polarimeters, to measure how ocean, clouds, and aerosols polarize light … or really, how light that gets polarized that way can tell us about the ocean, clouds, and aerosols that are polarizing it. In other words, it checks up on the planet’s health by looking at what’s floating in the ocean, what sea spray and other particulates are rising above it, and what particulates are floating around in the atmosphere.
As NASA says on the mission’s “About” page, “Observing chlorophyll from space has a long heritage – the first ocean color satellite, NASA’s Coastal Zone Color Scanner (CZCS) was launched in 1978.”
Unlike that satellite, this one looks beyond visual light into all sorts of frequencies we can’t see … but that can reveal a lot about what is evaporating what and how it affects the stuff that’s all around us humans.