BOULDER, Colo., Feb. 22 (UPI) -- A NASA satellite is set to carry a university-designed instrument to study the effect of changes in the sun's brightness on Earth's climate, officials said.
Developed by the University of Colorado Boulder, the $28 million instrument will be on board NASA's Glory mission, scheduled to launch Feb. 23 from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, a university release said Tuesday.
Designed and built by CU-Boulder's Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics, the Total Irradiance Monitor will point directly toward the sun to measure both short- and long-term fluctuations in the sun's energy output as it reaches the outer layers of Earth's atmosphere.
Variations in the sun's radiation can influence long-term climate change on Earth, TIM principal investigator Greg Kopp says.
"We'd like to know how the sun's energy changes over both the short and long term," Kopp says. "This spacecraft is carrying extremely sensitive instruments for monitoring solar variability, which makes the mission especially relevant given climate change on Earth and the importance of determining the natural influence on those changes."
Glory will join five other NASA Earth-observing satellites as part of the Afternoon Constellation, a tightly grouped series of spacecraft that circle the globe several times each day to gather information on Earth's biosphere and climate.
