Category Archives: climate change

climate change, glory mission

Your Name on Orbit

Leave a comment

NASA’s Glory Mission to Carry Names

Okay, how many times have you been sitting there reading stuff on your computer and learned about the opportunity to send your name into orbit on a spacecraft?  Well, sure there was one a few months back, and maybe another one a few years ago… but hey, my point is, here’s another chance–and nothing says “coolness to the max” like having your name on a spacecraft, right?  Darned right!  And, if thousands of us do it, it will be (in the immortal words of Arlo Guthrie) a movement.

The latest satellite-based list of names going into space is on Glory mission, which will be launched to help scientists measure aerosols — airborne particles — in our atmosphere.

Send your name on Glory and get a certificate like this!
Send your name on Glory and get a certificate like this!

Of course, we all know that changes in our climate are taking place. Understanding ALL the aspects of our atmosphere is important. You’ve heard of the greenhouse gases that are affecting our climate, and these are important. But, scientists say that the effects of aerosols could play a role in that change.

Glory will carry two scientific instruments, the Aerosol Polarimetry Sensor, or APS, and the Total Irradiance Monitor, or TIM, and two cameras that will be used to help identify clouds.  The APS instrument will be the main player in determining how and why aerosols affect our atmosphere. The TIM instrument will continue 30 years of measuring total solar irradiance, which is the amount of energy radiating from the Sun to Earth. Understanding the sun’s energy is an important key to understanding climate change on Earth.

The Glory mission will launch in June 2009 and you have til November 1 to get your name on the spacecraft. So, surf on over to the Glory poll site and enter your name. In return, you’ll get a nifty downloadable PDF to print out and show your friends. I did, and already, I feel tingly cool all over!!

atmosphere, climate change, Earth, global warming

Earth is Where It’s At

1 Comment

And It’s All We Have… For Now

https://i0.wp.com/nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/image/planetary/earth/gal_east-pacific.jpg?resize=474%2C356

Sooner or later, everybody who is interested in space and astronomy gets a look at our planet from “the outside.”  This image, from the Galileo spacecraft during one of its swings around Earth, tells a pretty remarkable story. If you were an incoming alien vessel, you’d see evidence of water. The oceans tell that story, but so do the clouds because they’re made of water vapor. The land masses would tell you that there are places to land on this planet, but at this distance and resolution, you wouldn’t be able to make out plants and animals… or humans and their cities.

If your alien ship had special sensors, it could use spectral analysis to dissect the gases in the atmosphere that blankets the planet. You would find oxygen, nitrogen, plus trace amounts of other gases.  Oh, and carbon dioxide. That’s a biggie. Carbon dioxide (you sometimes see it as CO2) is a by-product of living and geological processed. And, it’s the principal component of the greenhouse gases that we are pumping into our atmosphere from energy generation (driving cars, making electricity, powering manufacturing, etc.). The more greenhouse gases we load into the atmosphere, the warmer our climate is getting. And this is having an effect that future spacecraft will see (and we will have to live with).

As you can see from this picture, our atmosphere looks pretty thin when compared to the vastness of space and the size of our own planet. In fact, if you look at other planetary atmospheres in the solar system, you find them to be thick and heavy (Venus, the gas giants), or thin and possibly even fragile (Mars, Earth, some of the smaller moons of the outer solar system). What we learn about atmospheres is important, since our own planet has the only one that we know of that has harbored (and possibly even helped begin) life.  That makes what we’re doing to it with carbon dioxide a pretty major “experiment.”