Over the past 12 months NASA has added five missions to its orbiting Earth-observing fleet – the biggest one-year increase in more than a decade. NASA scientists will discuss early observations from the new missions and their current status during a media teleconference at 2 p.m. EST Thursday, Feb. 26.

New views of global carbon dioxide, rain and snowfall, ocean winds, and aerosol particles in the atmosphere will be presented during the briefing.

The first of the five new missions – the Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) core observatory – was launched from Japan one year ago on Feb. 27, 2014. The most recent – the Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) mission – was launched from California on Jan. 31 and is in its checkout phase before starting to collect data. Two missions are collecting NASA’s first ongoing Earth observations from the International Space Station (ISS).

The teleconference panelists are:

Peg Luce, deputy director of the Earth Science Division in NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, Headquarters, Washington

Gail Skofronick-Jackson, GPM project scientist, NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland

Ralph Basilio, Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 project manager, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California

Ernesto Rodriguez, ISS-RapidScat project scientist, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory

Matthew McGill, Cloud Aerosol Transport System (CATS) principal investigator, NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center