Viewing page 193 of 218

This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.

-8-

The third near-term program is a joint U.S.-French ocean topography experiment called TOPEX/POSEIDON. This mission, to be launched aboard the European Ariane rocket, will provide the first detailed measurements of the ocean's global circulation patterns, including the manner by which strong poleward currents, such as the Gulf Stream, are balanced by equatorward flow. Thus, it will permit a fundamental breakthrough in understanding of how the overall oceanic system functions. 

TOPEX/POSEIDON, as well as ESA's remote sensing satellite mission, ERS-1, are planned to be coordinated with extensive world-wide oceanographic field experiments scheduled to be conducted in the early 1990s by the World Climate Research Program of the World Meteorological Organization. Clearly, all of these efforts will lay the foundation for a continuing program to provide long-term observations of ocean circulation and its variability. 

The world user community will have access to data from the three future NASA missions I've just described, just as it has had access to data from NASA missions in the past. Similarly, all of us are benefiting from access to data from SPOT and from Japan's Marine Observations mission, MOS-1. And the user community looks forward to data from India's IRS-1 mission, from Soviet remote sensing instruments and from the many remote sensing missions being developed for flight in the early 1990s.