NASA probe to explore global atmosphere over oceans

WASHINGTON: NASA is set to launch a new airborne mission to map the contours of the atmosphere as carefully as explorers once traced the land and oceans below.The Atmospheric Tomography, or ATom, is the first to survey the atmosphere over the oceans, the US space agency said in a statement. Scientists aboard NASA's DC-8 flying laboratory will journey from the North Pole south over the Pacific Ocean to New Zealand and then across to the tip of South America and north up the Atlantic Ocean to Greenland.ATom will discover how much pollution survives to the most remote corners of the earth and assess how the environment has changed as a result, the statement added."We've had many airborne measurements of the atmosphere over land, where most pollutants are emitted, but land is only a small fraction of the planet," said Michael Prather, an atmospheric scientist and ATom's deputy project scientist at University of California Irvine.