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NASA Launches Aura Satellite

Posted by michael on from the holey-moley dept.

ukcollin writes "NASA successfully launched the Aura satellite today after several previous failed attempts. The Aura satellite was launched by a 12-story Delta 2 rocket, at 6:01am (EST) from Vandenberg AFB in California. The satellite is reported to have cost in excess of $785 million dollars, and its main mission will be to study the Earth's ozone to try and determine if the ozone hole is shrinking or increasing. Although it will be focused on the stratosphere (the ozone layer), it will also be tracking pollution, climate changes, etc. by scanning and analyzing each of Earth's atmospheric levels all the way down to the troposphere."

2 of 20 comments (clear)

  1. Re:A little irony by Neil+Blender · · Score: 3, Informative

    Um, not that I automatically disbelieve you or anything, but could you elaborate and/or cite some sources?

    Here is an article.

    Please note that I made no claim to the amount of ozone a single rocket launch depletes, it is fairly small. But rockets do destroy ozone, lots of rockets are launched every year, and the number of launches is undoubtedly going to increase as time goes on.

  2. Re:'Take the A-Train', from NASA by maddog42 · · Score: 2, Informative

    The first A-train satellite was Terra, launched in 2001. It and Aqua have similar sensor suites, geared towards terrestrial surface observation, whereas Aura carries no imaging (visible or near-ir) sensors. The biggest problem with having so many birds so close together in the time domain is that it's very difficult - without large expenditures - to track more than one at a time. As it is, Aura will conflict with Aqua (1330-1400 GMT ascending nodes). Fortunately, unless you're working in a heavily interdisciplinary environment, you will probably only need to track one of the two.