In a matter of days, the International Space Station will receive a new sensor for monitoring ocean winds back on Earth -- thereby opening a new phase of planetary study by the orbiting laboratory.

By the end of the decade, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration says, six Earth science instruments will be mounted on the the station to aid scientists study the changing planet.

On schedule to carried up to the ISS aboard a SpaceX Commercial Resupply Services mission scheduled for lift-off Sept. 19 from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida, the ISS-RapidScat will "monitor ocean winds for climate research, weather predictions and hurricane monitoring from the space station," according to a space agency news release.

"We're seeing the space station come into its own as an Earth-observing platform," Julie Robinson, chief scientist for the International Space Station Program at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, said in a statement. "It has a different orbit than other Earth remote sensing platforms. It's closer to Earth, and it sees Earth at different times of day with a different schedule. That offers opportunities that complement other Earth-sensing instruments in orbit today."

The second instrument planned for station delivery -- on the fifth SpaceX resupply flight in December -- is the Cloud-Aerosol Transport System, or CATS, a laser instrument designed to measure clouds and the location and distribution of airborne particles, such as mineral dust, smoke and other types of substances that end up polluting in the atmosphere.

The space station-based instruments join 17 NASA Earth-observing missions currently providing data on Earth's the dynamic global system.

February saw the launch of the Global Precipitation Measurement Core Observatory, a joint mission between NASA and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency. The Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 blasted off in July, making 2014 "one of the busiest periods for new NASA Earth science missions in more than a decade," agency officials announced.

The data generated by the ISS-RapidScat will support weather and marine forecasting, particularly storm and hurricane tracking.

The station's orbit will allow the instrument to make repeated, regular observations over the same locations at different times of day -- offering unique near-global measurements of how winds change over a 24-hour period.

Two other NASA Earth science instruments are scheduled to launch to the station in 2016 -- the Stratospheric Aerosol and Gas Experiment III, which will measure aerosols, ozone, water vapor and other gases in the upper atmosphere to help assess the condition of the ozone layer and better understand global climate change, and the Lightning Imaging Sensor, that will detect and locate lightning over tropical and mid-latitude regions of the globe.

In July, NASA selected proposals for two new instruments that will observe changes in global vegetation from the space station: the Global Ecosystem Dynamics Investigation, which will use a laser-based system to study forest canopy structure in a range of ecosystems, and the ECOsystem Spaceborne Thermal Radiometer Experiment on Space Station, or ECOSTRESS, a high-resolution multiple wavelength thermal imaging spectrometer that will study water use and water stress in vegetation.

"With the space station we don't have to build a spacecraft to gather new data -- it's already there," said Stephen Volz, associate director of flight programs in NASA's Earth Science Division. "The orbit enables rare, cross-disciplinary observations when the station flies under another sensor on a satellite. Designing instruments for the space station also gives us a chance to do high-risk, high-return instruments in a relatively economical way."