Engineers from the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) and NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. oversee the arrival and unpacking of the dual-frequency Precipitation Radar (DPR) built by Japan for the Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) mission's Core Observatory satellite. Comprised of two radars, the DPR is one of two instruments that will fly on the satellite, scheduled for launch in February 2014.

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Candace: The Dual Precipitation Radar, or DPR, made its way here from Japan. It was built by a company called NTSpace working for JAXA, the Japanese Space Agency.

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Art: The radars once they arrive here, they go through some processing, make sure during the shipment there was no damage done to the radars, even though we do have shock monitors on the boxes that we make sure there was no unexpected incidents happened during the transportation However, in spite of that, we still go through processing in house here, that we check, make sure functionally they're still working properly before they hand it over to NASA.

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Candace: The Dual Precipitation Radar, or DPR, has two parts: the first is the KaPR and the second is the KuPR, those are two different bands. And it provides simultaneous measurements in both of the bands, and it can be used to make combined products together with the GMI that allow the scientists to determine a lot more about precipitation, from rain, through snow, be it light or be it heavy, than they know today.

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Credit: NASAs Goddard Space Flight Center - Ryan Fitzgibbons