NASA's next launch to look back home
Aura will study Earth's atmosphere, climate change
By Michael Coren
CNN
 |  Aura will launch into orbit from California early Sunday. |
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| | FACT BOX | Aura's mission questions:
Is the ozone layer really recovering?
What factors control air quality?
How is Earth's climate changing? |
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(CNN) -- The final addition to a trio of Earth-monitoring satellites will blast into orbit Sunday, marking a 15-year effort by NASA to study our atmosphere and climate change in better detail.
"This is the most advanced atmospheric lab that has ever been launched," said Allen Buis, a spokesman for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. "It looks at all aspects of the Earth's atmosphere from different angles."
The 6,542-pound, solar-powered satellite will ride a Boeing rocket into orbit from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California at 3:02 a.m. (6:02 a.m. ET) Sunday.
The satellite is part of a multibillion-dollar effort by NASA -- and other space agencies -- to understand Earth's changing environment. The threat posed by global warming has intensified efforts, because climate researchers are frustrated by a lack of comprehensive data to predict climate change.
The launch of Aura, billed as "a complex mission for a complex problem," should go a long way toward addressing that problem.
"The payoffs [of the project] are enormous," said Phil DeCola, chief scientist for Aura. "These data series are national treasures."
Four of Aura's instruments will spend the next five to six years looking at the chemical composition of our atmosphere with a resolution between 10 and 200 miles, an unprecedented level of detail.
The three satellites in NASA's Earth Observing System -- Terra, Aqua and, soon, Aura -- will use electronic senses to measure such things as carbon dioxide and radiation bouncing off the clouds. In a few years, they will become part of an even larger array of six satellites known as the "A-Train," which will look at territory above and on the Earth with a battery of different instruments.
"It's a new concept where we are flying a series of spacecraft in formation," DeCola said. Scientists hope the stream of near-simultaneous data will allow them to untangle the many interrelated factors affecting our atmosphere.
Mission ahead
The $785 million Aura will take aim at the troubled ozone layer, air pollution and climate change, which scientists understand, for the most part, only anecdotally.
The ozone layer, which helps protect Earth's surface from solar radiation, is thought to be recovering from the erosion caused by decades of pollution. Between 1980 and 2000, the protective ozone in the stratosphere, about 10 to 30 miles high, decreased 3 percent. Each year, the ozone layer above polar regions opens up, allowing more ultraviolet radiation to reach the surface, harming plants and raising the risk of skin cancer. A ban on chlorofluorocarbons has lowered the concentration of ozone-depleting chemicals in the atmosphere, but more research is needed, scientists say.
Aura will also focus on climate change and how air pollution spreads around the world. Because those issues involve so many factors, it has been difficult to document them scientifically.
"It is really a mission that affects global change," said Joe Waters, principal investigator for the spacecraft's microwave limb sounder instrument. "We will have a better quantitative understanding of climate change and a better basis for making policy decisions."
The long-term effort will document complex interactions between water vapor, greenhouse gases and air pollution.
"Our species are having a big impact on this planet, and there are some very big decisions that have to be made," Waters said. "Hopefully, we can get some answers."
