{"id":9680,"date":"2024-02-08T19:35:47","date_gmt":"2024-02-08T19:35:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/topat10.com\/?p=9680"},"modified":"2024-02-08T19:35:47","modified_gmt":"2024-02-08T19:35:47","slug":"nasas-new-pace-observatory-searches-for-clues-to-humanitys-future","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/topat10.com\/?p=9680","title":{"rendered":"NASA\u2019s New PACE Observatory Searches for Clues to Humanity\u2019s Future"},"content":{"rendered":"


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Way up in the sky and sprinkled across the seas, two of the littlest yet most influential things in the world have stubbornly guarded their secrets: aerosols and phytoplankton. Today, NASA launched its Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud, Ocean Ecosystem<\/a> mission, or PACE, to unravel their mysteries. The mission\u2019s findings could be a key to understanding how drastically the world is changing as it warms.<\/p>\n

Aerosols are little bits of dust, wildfire smoke<\/a>, and fossil fuel pollution floating around the atmosphere, which both absorb and reflect the sun\u2019s energy and help build clouds\u2014wildly complex dynamics that climate models still struggle to account for<\/a>. And phytoplankton are the microscopic, plant-like marine organisms that form the foundation of the food web. They also sequester carbon, keeping Earth\u2019s climate from warming even further<\/a>. \u201cPhytoplankton are basically moving carbon around, and we need to understand how that changes with time,\u201d says Jeremy Werdell of NASA\u2019s Goddard Space Flight Center.<\/p>\n

PACE is a satellite observatory that\u2019ll provide scientists with unprecedented views of these ultra-important denizens of the skies and seas, to help them try to predict how our world will evolve. \u201cThe warming atmosphere and warming oceans have a cost, and that cost from a biological point of view is that the base of the food chain will unequivocally change,\u201d says Werdell, who is the project scientist of PACE.<\/p>\n

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