ATom

Scientists treating Earth as a feverish patient are giving it the equivalent of a CAT scan, targeting short-life pollutants that spur climate change to try to find a remedy that dials back the heat.

Ambient aerosols – those tiny mixtures of liquids and solids suspended in air – play important roles in Earth's climate, so much so that scientists are heading to remote locations to better understand them.

Two thirds of Earth's surface are covered by water — and two thirds of Earth's atmosphere reside over the oceans, far from land and the traditional ways that people measure the gases and pollutants that cycle through the air and around the globe. While satellites in space measuring the major gases can close some of that gap, it takes an aircraft to find out what's really happening in the chemistry of the air above the oceans. That's where NASA's Atmospheric Tomography (ATom) mission comes in.

A suite of scientists are zig-zagging across the globe in a flying laboratory, a DC-8 research plane retrofitted to gulp the air we breathe. Soaring from the Arctic to Antarctica on flights crammed with valves, funnels and testing equipment, scientists from NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View and other labs capture greenhouse gases and gather data about pollution in Earth’s atmosphere. The final leg of the four-part expedition of the Atmospheric Tomography Mission, also known as ATom, will take off from Palmdale Thursday.

O Douglas DC-8 da NASA, uma aeronave experimental pertencente ao Centro de Pesquisa em Voo Armstrong, chegara hoje as 18h15 no Aeroporto Internacional do Recife, representando a missao ATom e tambem um trafego aereo diferente nos dias atuais, visto que poucos DC-8 continuam operando no mundo.