CloudSat
decommissioned NASA Earth observation satellite
CloudSat is a Passivated NASA Earth observation satellite, which was launched on a Delta II rocket on April 28, 2006, and is awaiting disposal. It used radar to measure the altitude and properties of clouds, adding to the information on the relationship between clouds and climate to help resolve questions about global warming.
It operated in daytime-only operations from 2011 to 2023 due to battery malfunction, requiring sunlight to power the radar. On December 15, 2023, the Cloud Profiling Radar was deactivated for the final time, ending the data collection portion of the mission.
The mission was selected under NASA's Earth System Science Pathfinder program in 1999. Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp. in Boulder, Colorado, designed and built the spacecraft.
CloudSat's primary mission was scheduled to continue for 22 months to allow more than one seasonal cycle to be observed.
Instrument
The main instrument on CloudSat was the Cloud Profiling Radar (CPR), a 94-GHz nadir-looking radar that measures the power backscattered by clouds as a function of distance from the radar. The radar instrument was developed at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, with hardware contributions from the Canadian Space Agency.
The public source identifies “CloudSat” as decommissioned NASA Earth observation satellite. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around CloudSat, decommissioned and NASA.
Why this record matters
A short description can identify a subject without explaining its stakes. For “CloudSat”, the useful work is to connect “decommissioned NASA Earth observation satellite” to the records capable of establishing context and consequence.
Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Oct 10, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q49397. The first chronological checks are 2006, 2011, 2023 and 1999.
Overview language is designed for orientation and should not be treated as a substitute for the evidence cited beneath it. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “CloudSat” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.