The NASA Scatterometer (NSCAT) was launched aboard the Japanese Advanced Earth Observing Satellite (ADEOS) in August, 1996. From September 1996 when the instrument was first turned on, until premature termination of the mission due to failure of the satellite in June 1997, NSCAT performed flawlessly and returned a continuous stream of global sea surface wind vector measurements. Unprecedented for coverage, resolution, and accuracy in the determination of ocean wind speed and direction, NSCAT data has already been applied to a wide variety of scientific and operational problems. These applications include such diverse areas as weather forecasting and the estimation of tropical rain forest reduction. Because of the success of the short-lived NSCAT mission, future Ku-band scatterometer instruments are now greatly anticipated by the ocean winds user community. The NSCAT mission has proven so successful, in fact, that plans for a follow-on mission have been accelerated to minimize the gap in the scatterometer wind database.

The NSCAT Mission is managed for the NASA Office of Earth Science by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), a division of the California Institute of Technology.