On October 3, Mylswamy Annadurai, the mission director, Chandrayaan-1, is visibly tense. The spacecraft, moved out the previous day from the laboratories of the isro Satellite Centre in Bangalore, is being transported at 20 kmph by road to the spaceport in Sriharikota, some 300 km away. Annadurai is tense because a local newspaper has gone and splashed the picture of the convoy on its front page.
Why does a developing nation have such an ambitious space programme? Subhadra Menon traces its foundations back to the work of one visionary physicist 60 years ago.
This factsheet provides the information on the Atmospheric Infrared Sounder(AIRS), which advances climate research
and weather prediction into the 21st century. AIRS is one of six
instruments onboard Aqua, a satellite that is part of NASA
JPL Historian Erik Conway provides an overview of the sequence of events that lead to the link between human activity, carbon dioxide, and global warming. Conway also examines how the spaceborne instrument, the Atmospheric Infrared Sounder, has become part of the story.
A NASA/university team has published the first global satellite maps of the key greenhouse gas carbon dioxide in Earth's mid-troposphere, an area about 8 kilometers, or 5 miles, above Earth. The team's study reveals new information on how carbon dioxide, which directly contributes to climate change, is distributed in Earth's atmosphere and moves around our world.
Human activity has increased the concentration of the earth's atmospheric carbon dioxide, which plays a direct role in contributing to global warming. Mid-tropospheric CO2 retrieved by the Atmospheric Infrared Sounder shows a substantial spatiotemporal variability that is supported by in situ aircraft measurements.
