Aerospace company Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp. built Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) mission Core Satellite's Microwave Imager (GMI) under a deal for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). According to reports, the mission has performed well in its first year on orbit.

Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) is an international satellite mission by United States space agency that collects data from 12 weather satellites orbiting earth. The mission combines data into one global picture of rain and snow. It is the first time when scientists have ever had map of where and when rain will fall. The mission makes map every half an hour with a resolution of about 10km by 10km.

The mission was launched last February. Jim Oschmann, vice-president and general manager of Ball's Civil Space and Technology business unit, said, “The Ball GMI enhanced subsystems design enables excellent science data performance with calibration accuracy. GMI incorporates lessons learned from other radiometers which have taken Earth science measurements from low and medium Earth orbits for the last 20 years”.

To remember officially a year of operations, the space agency has released a video, which demonstrated a week of rainfall. The video was from August 4 to August 14 last year. In the video, one can see from the small but ferocious rainstorms at the equator to storm in Antarctica. The video by NASA is an eye-opening video, which showed interesting things about the planet’s weather.

According to some climate scientists, the video is not only interesting to watch, but it also has far greater implications. The information that where rain is falling and when could be helpful in understanding how climate has been changing on earth. As rainfall becoming a problem by the year, the mission could get more important data.