I am writing today to announce the closure of the New Mexico Independent. After three and a half years of operation in New Mexico, the board of the American Independent News Network, has decided to shift publication of its news…
While environmental activists played their part yesterday during demonstrations at the capitol building, going so far as to dress up as solar panels and to sing the tune of “You Are My Sunshine,” their counterparts, the anti-cap-and-trade contingency who has…
Roughly one quarter of University of New Mexico students are unimpressed with the state’s flagship public school, according to a survey that questioned college students about their higher education experiences.
Soot from commercial space flights at the New Mexico-based Spaceport America could dramatically hasten global climate change, according to a new study.
While rain will remove rocket exhaust soot from the lower atmosphere, carbon particles will remain in the stratosphere, according to a paper to be published in the scientific journal Geophysics Research Letters.
The study was reviewed Friday by Nature online.
According to the paper, 1,000 commercial space flights a year would increase polar surface temperatures by 1°C, and disrupt ozone distributions over the northern hemisphere.
That modest temperature change would be enough to reduce north-pole sea ice by 5 to 15 percent, the authors estimate.
“There are fundamental limits to how much material human beings can put into orbit without having a significant impact,” said study co-author Martin Ross, an atmospheric scientist at the U.S. Air Force-funded Aerospace Corporation in Los Angeles, California.
Gov. Bill Richardson and Virgin Galactic CEO Richard Branson inaugurated the Las Cruces, N.M.-based Spaceport runway Friday.
Virgin Galactic plans to launch up to two rockets a day — or up to 730 launches a year — from the facility once its space tourism operations are up and running. Other commercial space flight companies are expected to compete with the company.
Last month, Congress authorized NASA to invest $1.6 billion in commercial space flight vehicle development.
Injecting 600 metric tons of soot per year at Spaceport America would create a highly-localized layer of carbon particles in the stratosphere, which would remain over the northern hemisphere, according to the computer models used in the new study.
Government and commercial space flight scientists must study the problem more closely, Ross said.
