It was to be expected that the effects of the corona virus on air quality in China would be more than noticeable. The lockdown of various cities in the Chinese province of Hubei, which started on January 23, 2020, halted an entire community. The impact on air quality, as a result of the strong reduction in the burning of fossil fuels, is clearly perceptible from space with the TROPOMI instrument.
For the International Day of Women and Girls in Science (February 11), we took the opportunity to ask some of our female researchers about their experiences with science. Read on to discover what they have to tell.
During the previous months, the exceptionally large wildfires in Australia were frequently mentioned in the news. As Royal Belgian Institute for Space Aeronomy, we are involved in space-borne and ground-based instruments that can detect such fires from space, in an indirect way. But what does this mean exactly, and how are these observations meaningful?
Even three years after the end of the Rosetta mission, comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko still hasn’t revealed all its secrets. Close to the end of the mission, a comet particle entered the ROSINA/DFMS instrument, which was designed to study only comet gas. In doing so, comet scientists discovered a group of less volatile substances known as "ammonium salts". This discovery explains why comets seem to contain so little nitrogen: the nitrogen is trapped in these substances that are difficult to detect from Earth. Ammonium salts are particularly intriguing because they contribute to the building blocks of life.
A long time ago (in 2008), in a place far, far above our heads, the SOLAR instrument, fixed on the outside of the International Space Station, started the mission it was designed for: to measure the radiation from the Sun from outside Earth’s atmosphere for a duration of 18 months, in order to compile a reference solar spectrum that is necessary for many fields of scientific research.