Otto Hasekamp is a senior scientist at the Netherlands Institute for Space Research (SRON) and is the science lead for the SPEXOne polarimeter that will be on PACE.
What is your favorite atmospheric or oceanic related book or movie?
It’s not a book, but my favorite bit of writing about the atmosphere is actually a review article from 1974 – the year I was born! – on light scattering by atmospheric particles. It’s something that I’ve come back to through my whole career. It was written by Jim Hansen and Larry Travis from NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, and is sort of the cornerstone for polarimetry.
What are you most looking forward to during launch?
I’m really excited to see the satellite go up and then get the notification that everything has gone right with the satellite. It will really be a relief, and I’m looking forward to that green light.
What are you most looking forward to post-launch?
The commissioning phase where we check all the measurements and the instrument will be an exciting and intense period. I’m really looking forward to the first measurements of SPEXOne. On the somewhat longer term I look forward for our team to first real science results, that improve our understanding of aerosols and clouds.
What is your favorite color and why?
My favorite color is blue. Why? Well, of course when the sky is really clear it shows up very blue and I think that’s a great thing to look at.
Otto Hasekamp at the Berger Kogel, Austria, September 2023. Courtesy of Otto Hasekamp
Do you have a favorite type of cloud or atmospheric phenomenon?
The very, very thick clouds when there’s a thunderstorm coming that are sort of scary to see. It gives a special atmosphere.
What’s a fun fact about yourself, something that people might not know about you?
I like hiking in the mountains. Every year, for 25 years, I go hiking in the mountains with friends of mine and we hope to continue to do that for a long time. I’ve also crossed the Arctic Circle.
What advice would you give to aspiring scientists who are looking to get to where you are today?
Persist. Accept that things go slowly but persist and you will get where you want to be. I think that is maybe the most important one. Keep in mind the impacts of what you do, that’s another important one.
What is one catch-all statement describing the importance of SPEXOne?
It will help the understanding of the cooling effect that fine particulate matter has on the climate.
Header image caption: Otto Hasekamp presenting SPEXone at the International Astronautical Congress (IAC) conference, Washington, D.C., October 2019. Courtesy of Otto Hasekamp
By Erica McNamee, Science Writer at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center
Kirk Knobelspiesse is an atmospheric scientist and the project science team polarimeter lead for PACE at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. He is also the polarimeter instrument scientist for the Atmosphere Observing System (AOS) constellation.
Kirk Knobelspiesse hiking sand dunes near Swakopmund, Namibia, during the ORACLEs field campaign. Image Credit: Michal Segal-Rozenhaimer
What is your favorite atmospheric or ocean related book or movie?
There was a series on Netflix called “Connected” that had an episode called “Dust.” The general idea is that everything in the world is connected, so it started with dust that was generated in the Sahara Desert, specifically the Bodélé Depression. And that dust – which is really from a dry lakebed – gets lofted into the atmosphere and goes out over the oceans, and in the process interacts with clouds and potentially fertilizes the ocean. That dust makes it all the way to the Amazon basin where it may also be an important source of nutrients.
What is your background?
I am a photographer who got really into imaging of all kinds, which led me to remote sensing. I ended up doing work on remote sensing of Earth from space and worked on SeaWiFs, which was an early ocean color mission. I decided I need to go back to grad school and get a more quantitative education, so I got an applied math degree at Columbia University.
What are you most looking forward to during launch?
Earlier in my career I worked on a satellite that had a launch failure (Glory in 2011). So, during launch, I am going to shut myself in a closet and not learn any news until somebody tells me it’s all over. Because it makes me so nervous. A lot of people want to go and see the launch and that kind of thing. Not me, I’m going to stay away. Somebody will tell me when it’s all over.
What are you most looking forward to post-launch?
Kirk Knobelspiesse in his office at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. Image Credit: Kirk Knobelspiesse
I have a list of all the Science and Nature papers we’re hoping to write with PACE data. It’s ambitious, a little bit. But there are new types of observations that we will be making, that no other satellite will have done so far, at least not at a global scale. One aspect I’m interested in is just exploring the data, looking for basic things that will be useful for our understanding of aerosols and clouds and the climate in general.
I have some pet projects that I’ve always been interested in, for example a specific situation when aerosols are lofted above clouds. Aerosols are generally something that cools the climate because they reflect light. But if you have, say, a dark smoke aerosol on top of the cloud, it actually warms the climate, because it absorbs some of the energy that would have otherwise been reflected into space. So that’s something we’ll be able to do with PACE that we don’t really have great observations of now.
What is your favorite color and why?
I have a 10-year-old daughter, and favorite colors are very important to her and her friends. They’re always asking me what my favorite color is, and I say I can never answer them because how can you like one color without liking all the others?
Do you have a favorite type of cloud or weird atmospheric phenomena?
There’s also an optical phenomenon called glory. If you’re floating above a cloud and the Sun is behind, you look down at your shadow and you will see your shadow with a glory around it, which is like a circular rainbow around yourself. That’s one of my favorite optical phenomena.
What’s a fun fact about yourself? Something that a lot of people might not know about you?
Kirk Knobelspiesse working on the NASA P-3 during the ORACLES field campaign in São Tomé, São Tomé and Príncipe. Image Credit: Andrzej Wasilewski
I’ve been to latitude zero, longitude zero, the point in the South Atlantic Ocean where the equator and prime meridian intersect. It was part of the ORACLES field campaign. There’s nothing special there. It’s just ocean – and I don’t mean to offend my oceanographer friends by saying it’s nothing special – but there was no pillar of fire or something like that.
What advice would you give to aspiring scientists looking to get where you are today?
Don’t pigeonhole yourself into one discipline or one topic of study. Not just computer science or physics or oceanography. They’re human constructs, sociological constructs, and they don’t have anything to do with nature, other than how we have organized ourselves. A lot of where I’ve found interesting and productive things to do have been at the boundary between disciplines, or learning from one discipline and applying that approach to another discipline. So, don’t tell yourself, “I can’t do something because I’m not trained to do that.” You can learn and you can train yourself, and don’t be afraid to go out on a limb and do something you don’t really know how to do.
What is one catch-all statement describing the importance of PACE?
We will be making use of things that people cannot see – the nature of light – to understand things that we can’t otherwise observe.
Header image caption: Kirk Knobelspiesse hiking at Rachel Carson Conservation Park in Brookeville, Md. Image Credit: Barbara Balestra
By Erica McNamee, Science Writer at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center
