NASA Launches Aura Satellite

Posted by michael on Thursday July 15, 2004 @07:02AM 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."

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Re:A little irony by Neil+Blender · 2004-07-15 09:01 · 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.