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ABOUT AQUA

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Aqua, Latin for water, is a NASA Earth Science satellite mission named for the large amount of information that the mission is collecting about the Earth's water cycle, including evaporation from the oceans, water vapour in the atmosphere, clouds, precipitation, soil moisture, sea ice, land ice, and snow cover on the land and ice. Additional variables also being measured by Aqua include radiative energy fluxes, aerosols, vegetation cover on the land, phytoplankton and dissolved organic matter in the oceans, and air, land, and water temperatures.

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Aqua was launched on May 4, 2002, and has six Earth-observing instruments on board, collecting a variety of global data sets.

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Aqua was the first member launched of a group of satellites termed the Afternoon Constellation, or sometimes the A-Train.

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