December 2014
Terraforming Mars: from CFCs to Total Recall
...a challenging task. The greenhouse effect involves absorption and re-emission of outgoing infrared radiation by a planet’s atmosphere. On Earth, carbon dioxide (CO2) and water vapour (H2O) are the two main greenhouse gases. Together, they raise Earth...
March 2015
JAXA’s challenge to climate change
...orbit. However, when the Kyoto Protocol was agreed at COP3 in 2002, technology was needed to verify reductions in carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. A decision was made to change the mission completely in order to monitor tropospheric CO2 absorption and...
05 May 2016
Contract signed by Airbus, Space UK and ESA to deliver Biomass satellite
... flies at an altitude of 660 km. It will measure biomass at a resolution of 200 m and deforestation at 50 m to analyse how much carbon dioxide is being absorbed by the world's forests and to provide a better insight into rates of habitat loss and the...
October 2015
Copernicus, ESA’s most ambitious Earth Observation programme
... fluorescence in terrestrial vegetation; and CarbonSat2—a proposed 3 to 5 year mission—that will measure global atmospheric amounts of carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane (CH4 ) with high spatial resolution and coverage1, which can be used to improve...
March 2022
Space travel and environmental sustainability
... and consider it in terms, not of seats to space, but of fuel burned (and thus emissions of water vapour and carbon dioxide). Then, at the technological level represented by today’s Crew Dragon, it would still be permissible for over 10,000 space...
06 April 2020
Planets can form second atmospheres rich in CO, new study shows
... readily accreted on to a terrestrial exoplanet milling around in the disk. In disks that were slightly more massive, enough carbon dioxide (CO) could be accreted to give an exoplanet sub-Neptune-like atmospheric pressures. “We show the effect of gas...
