Satellite "fails" to reach orbit days before ship expedition sets out ?

Last week the Glory satellite failed to reach orbit. Compare the stated "methods and goals" of the bird with the goals of a ship that left right before the bird "failed."

The Glory satellite was to monitor how the sun and tiny particles in the Earth's atmosphere, called aerosols, affect the planet's climate.

"It's pretty sad," said Mian Chin, of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. "Glory would have provided the micro-physics and aerosol composition data that are currently not available from other satellite data."

Aerosols are tiny liquid and solid particles suspended in the atmosphere from both manmade and natural sources. Human-produced aerosols come from burning fossil fuels and biomass and coal combustions. Aerosols are also injected into the atmosphere by volcanoes or forest fires.

And jets that spray them on purpose.

"Because we can't easily distinguish what's what from space, we don't have good global coverage of exactly how much of the aerosol is anthropogenic, and how much is natural," said NASA climate scientist Gavin Schmidt, on the blog Real Climate, for which he is a contributor.

Aerosols scatter and absorb incoming sunlight — or radiation reflected by the surface of Earth — as it passes through the atmosphere. Some aerosols scatter light back to space, thus cooling the Earth's surface. Other kinds of aerosols, particularly the ones that come from burning fossil fuels, absorb some of the light and warm the Earth's atmosphere.

Scientists can currently only take snapshots of aerosols. But the instrument on Glory would have been the first capable of identifying aerosol types globally from space, and then tracked how they changed with time, to help pinpoint how they are affecting the climate, Chin told OurAmazingPlanet.

"It's a big setback," said Chin, who was involved with the design and review of the aerosol measuring instrument.

The week before the "setback," a ship based expedition to monitor aerosol particles set out.

As we all know, "they're" the ones spraying the bulk of the particles, as many millions have noticed.

The claim is that they're trying to see the color of the Atlantic but when you read the article, you find:

They want to discover the impact of hazy clouds of aerosol particles hanging above the water on algae that are the basis of the marine food chain...

But satellite images in recent years have shown large aerosol clouds forming above the oceans, particularly in the southern part of the Atlantic.

They increase the amount of the sun's rays reflected away from the sea, reducing the amount of algae and therefore lessening the water's greenish hue.

Instead of the satellite, they're using a ship based research expedition strangely launched days before the "failure." Was this a back up plan and if so, why ?

The project involves scientists from Brazil, Argentina, France and the US currently aboard the Melville, a research vessel belonging to the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego.

The team hope to gain more accurate measurements of what is happening than those taken from satellites that may be distorted by strong winds or waves.

The Melville left Cape Town in late February and is scheduled to arrive in Valparaiso, Chile, next week.

So many strange coincidences. So little time.

SPQR