News release: “In one of the space agency’s bolder projects, a newly launched NASA satellite will monitor western drought and study the moisture, frozen and liquid in Earth’s soil. It’s true that a satellite can’t possibly fix the devastating drought that has been plaguing the American West for the last years. It is also true that it can’t possibly change the fact that California has just gone through the driest month in recorded history. But what NASA plans to do is to provide the possibility of understanding the patterns of this extreme weather and, perhaps, foresee how much worse it could actually become.Called the SMAP (Soil Moisture Active Passive Satellite), this new, unmanned project was successfully launched on Saturday atop the United Launch Alliance Delta II Rocket. The launch took place at the California Vandenberg Air Force base at exactly 9:22 AM EST. With the successful launch, NASA just kick started a three year, $916 million mission focused on measuring and forecasting droughts, floods and other possible natural disasters that might come our way in the future.  With the help of SMAP, scientists will be able to measure the top 2 inches of Earth’s soil. SMAP is equipped with an enormous antenna that can help generate a global map of our planet’s topsoil moisture situation. Such a map will be created every three days for the first three years of the missions, NASA officials reveal.”