With less than one year to launch, France’s Centre National d’Etudes Spatiales (CNES) and NASA are completing the final spacecraft assembly of the Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) spacecraft. SWOT is a joint NASA and CNES mission with contributions by the Canadian Space Agency (CSA) and the United Kingdom Space Agency (UKSA). The SWOT mission will be the first-ever global surveyor of all of Earth’s water and study how bodies of water change over time.
SWOT will launch on top of a SpaceX Falcon 9 from Space Launch Complex 4 East (SLC-4E) at Vandenberg Space Force Base (VSFB) in California. The mission is currently scheduled for launch no earlier than November 2022.