NASA's Launches Mission to Study Earth's 'Invisible Universe'

After a nine year wait, NASA's finally launched its PACE mission, which will take a never-before-seen look at the tiny life forms and particles teeming in our planet's atmosphere. What it uncovers could revolutionize our understanding of global warming, our planet's oceans, and those oceans' threatened ecosystems.

"What we're doing here with PACE is really the search for the microscopic, mostly invisible universe in the sea and the sky, and in some degrees, on land, too," PACE project scientist Jeremy WerdellFalcon 9 rocket carrying the nearly $1 billion PACE satellite took off early Thursday morning from Cape Canaveral, Florida. Once deployed, the satellite is expected to carry out the mission for at least three years, but has enough fuel to stay in orbit for at least ten.

As photosynthesizers, phytoplanktons — which include tiny algae and plants — have produced around 50 percent of the Earth's oxygen. Crucially, they also suck up huge amounts of carbon dioxide that'd otherwise stay in the atmosphere to heat up the planet. They're clearly indispensable, but some species come with a major caveat: they produce toxic blooms that threaten other forms of marine life.

Aerosols play a similarly important role. While greenhouse gasses like carbon get all the attention for driving global warming, aerosols also affect our climate — and "They come from sources like dust blowing off the Sahara wildfires and even human activities," NASA Earth Science director Karen St. Germain told. "They seed clouds that can grow into hurricanes coming across the Atlantic, but they also reflect a lot of the sun's energy., it's more important than ever to understand how Earth's ecosystems — and its oceans especially — will be affected by climate change.

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