SeaWinds on QuikSCAT NASA JPL Ocean Wind Satellite Patch

QuikSCAT was built in about 12 months, faster than any NASA mission since the 1950s, because the ocean wind instrument before it had failed. That was NSCAT, the NASA Scatterometer, which stopped working in June 1997 after about nine and a half months in orbit. QuikSCAT was the quick recovery mission, managed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory with the NSCAT team. It launched on June 19, 1999, on a Titan II from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. Its one instrument, SeaWinds, measured wind speed and direction over the ice-free oceans by reading how the wind roughens the water.

SeaWinds is a Ku-band radar working at 13.4 GHz, with a 1-meter dish antenna that spins to sweep two spot beams across the sea. It covered a swath 1,800 kilometers wide with no gap under the spacecraft, and it returned at least one wind measurement over about 93 percent of the world's oceans every day. Forecasters at the National Hurricane Center used it to track storms, estimate their strength and analyze their winds. The same data helped map sea ice, track icebergs and find the line where ice was freezing or thawing. A nearly identical SeaWinds instrument also flew on the ADEOS-II satellite.

The patch is a 4 by 2.5 inch rectangle with a white merrowed border around a white twill field. In the center an oval of deep blue sea sits inside a rim of yellow, orange and red, like the Sun coming up over the water. SeaWinds runs across it in tan script, and a breaking wave in navy, blue and white curls over the right side. A blue ribbon below carries ON QUIKSCAT in white letters. It has a sew-on backing.

QuikSCAT was meant to bridge a gap and ended up working for more than ten years. In November 2009 a bearing in the antenna motor failed and the dish stopped spinning, and wind measurements ended on November 23. The radar kept running in a fixed-angle mode after that, and the mission was finally shut down on October 2, 2018. Its record of ocean winds fed weather forecasts, climate studies and marine safety work around the world. The team at JPL got it built, launched and working in about two years from the loss of NSCAT.

It fits a shadow box with other JPL and Earth science mission patches, or on the jacket of someone who worked on the instrument or used its winds at a forecast desk. It is also a good gift for a meteorologist, an oceanographer or a sailor who knows what a good wind map is worth. One wave, one radar, and the whole ocean every day.