Glory was to lift-off last week, but technical issues with ground support equipment for the Taurus XL launch vehicle postponed the event. NASA says those issues have been resolved and Glory is back on track!

Glory will be an important tool in understanding the Earth’s climate. One of its missions is to detect and measure the small particles in the Earth’s atmosphere called aerosols. Aerosols, or the gases that lead to their formation, can come from vehicle tailpipes and desert winds, from sea spray and fires, volcanic eruptions and factories. Even lush forests, soils or communities of plankton in the ocean can be sources of certain types of aerosols.

The ubiquitous particles drift in Earth’s atmosphere, from the stratosphere to the surface, and range in size from a few nanometers, less than the width of the smallest viruses, to several tens of micrometers, about the diameter of human hair.

The particles can directly influence climate by reflecting or absorbing the sun’s radiation. In broad terms, this means bright-colored or translucent aerosols, such as sulfates and sea salt aerosols, tend to reflect radiation back towards space and cause cooling. In contrast, darker aerosols, such as black carbon and other types of carbonaceous particles, can absorb significant amounts of light and contribute to atmospheric warming.

Aerosols are short-lived and their impacts are not fully understood. From Scientific American:

NASA climate expert and Glory science team member James Hansen has said the range of uncertainty associated with the climate impact of aerosols is three or four times that of greenhouse gases.

Glory hopes to remedy that uncertainty.

In addition, Glory will monitor variations in solar activity by measuring the amount of radiation that strikes the top of Earth’s atmosphere. The sun has been in a relatively quiet phase, even as we head to the solar maximum. The satellite could allow scientists to understand how this and future solar cycles influence climate here on Earth.

As Glory monitors the Earth’s climate, we’ll be monitoring news from the mission. Stay tuned!

“I don’t imagine you’ll ever hear the phrase ‘seal the deal’ again, unless perhaps the worst worst-case scenarios unfold and the climate system comes utterly unglued.” That’s Andrew Revkin’s reaction to the closing of the Cancun climate talks in today’s New York Times. Heads of States seemed to be missing, debates continue to rage over the Kyoto Protocol and developing nations’ and climate-affected island states’ shouts were not heard. From New Scientist:

…on the platform, the chairman of the African Union Commission, Jean Ping, noted that “Africa’s billion people are polluting roughly as much as Texas, which has 25 million people.” But Barack Obama was not there to answer.

The talks end today… don’t expect too much, says Nature’s The Great Beyond blog:

Contrary to Copenhagen, the goal going into Cancun was to make incremental progress. That seemed doable at the time, but nobody is taking anything for granted today.

Now for some fun! Through Twitter, we found this great defense of the existence of Santa… in the Multiverse. Yes, Virginia…

Follow that frog! Did you know that frogs’ bladders can hunt and remove foreign objects in their bodies? In their attempts to track frogs in Australia, scientists were implanting the amphibians with bead-sized transmitters. Within a few weeks, the transmitters had moved to their bladders and/or had simply been expelled (peed) out and left behind. Lab tests followed and results published. Read more here or here.

Bio-Inspiration: Ants travels could lead to better computer networks. According to Nature News, Argentine ants are so adept at finding the shortest routes to food and changing those routes when necessary (high traffic, obstacles), that systems engineers are hoping to learn from their behavior and build more efficient networks.

Continue to follow Science Today’s efficient science news network and lead us down some new paths by adding your comments below!

Using satellite data from NASA’s Solar Radiation and Climate Experiment (SORCE) satellite, researchers found that between 2004 and 2007, low solar activity actually resulted in more energy and visible light reaching the Earth, warming our climate. The findings are published today in the journal Nature.

Solar activity increases and decreases over a cycle that lasts roughly 11 years. Even after centuries of study, we have only begun to get a complete picture of the process. From a corresponding article in Nature:

Sunspots, dark areas of reduced surface temperature on the Sun caused by intense magnetic activity, are the best-known visible manifestation of the 11-year solar cycle. They have been regularly observed and recorded since the dawn of modern astronomy in the seventeenth century. But measurements of the wavelengths of solar radiation have until now been scant.

Instruments on the SORCE satellite measure the Sun’s energy output at many different wavelengths of light. Researchers fed the data from SORCE into an existing computer model of Earth’s atmosphere and compared their results with the results obtained using earlier, less comprehensive, data on the solar spectrum.

And the results were shocking. From New Scientist:

Previous studies have shown that Earth is normally cooler during solar minima. Yet the model suggested that more solar energy reached the planet’s surface during the period, warming it by about 0.05°C.

This surprising finding led the researchers to believe that the inverse might also be true: in periods when the Sun’s activity increases, it might tend to cool, rather than warm, Earth. But, they warn, more data are needed.

Joanna Haigh, an atmospheric physicist at Imperial College London and lead author of the study, said:

These results are challenging what we thought we knew about the Sun’s effect on our climate. However, they only show us a snapshot of the Sun’s activity and its behavior over the three years of our study could be an anomaly.

We cannot jump to any conclusions based on what we have found during this comparatively short period and we need to carry out further studies to explore the Sun’s activity, and the patterns that we have uncovered, on longer timescales. However, if further studies find the same pattern over a longer period of time, this could suggest that we may have overestimated the Sun’s role in warming the planet, rather than underestimating it.

In addition, Martin Dameris, an atmospheric scientist at the German Aerospace Center, warns that human activity still lies at the heart of our current warming trend. As quoted in the Nature article:

The findings could prove very significant when it comes to understanding, and quantifying, natural climate fluctuations. But no matter how you look at it, the Sun’s influence on current climate change is at best a small natural add-on to man-made greenhouse warming.