Global Warming Gives Earth Blue Balls

[Tuckerfan]

Satellite to study blue clouds thought to be caused by global warming.

NASA’s AIM spacecraft is designed to seek out and study noctilucent – or ‘night shining’ – clouds, odd collections of ice crystals that form near the edge of space some 50 miles (80 kilometers) above Earth’s polar regions. The clouds form so high above Earth that they reflect sunlight after the Sun has dipped below Earth’s horizon.

But while the phenomena were first observed in 1885, researchers still don’t know how the clouds form, why they vary and their connections to Earth’s changing climate or the Sun’s energy.

“They are increasing in frequency. They are getting brighter and are appearing at lower latitudes than before,” AIM principal investigator Jim Russell, of Virginia’s Hampton University, said of AIM’s cloudy quarry Wednesday just before launch. “We need to know why it’s happening and what the relationship is to global climate change and to what we’re doing to our atmosphere.”

Also of note is that the bird was launched from an airplane.