Mar 15 2004
From The Space Library
William H. Pickering, a former Director of NASA's JPL, died at the age of 93. Pickering had begun his career at JPL in 1944 and had served as Director from 1954 to 1976. Soon after becoming Director of JPL, Pickering had led a project that had successfully launched the first U.S. satellite Explorer 1 into Earth orbit on 31 January 1958. During the remainder of Pickering's tenure, JPL had launched the Ranger and Surveyor missions to the Moon and the Mariner missions to Mars and Venus. Pickering had received numerous awards during his lifetime: NASA had presented him with its Distinguished Service Medal, President Gerald R. Ford had awarded him the National Medal of Science, and the Queen of England had given him an honorary knighthood. (NASA, “NASA Remembers William H. Pickering, Former Director of JPL,” news release 04-094, 16 March 2004.
NASA-funded researchers announced that they had found the most distant object orbiting the Sun yet discovered. Michael E. Brown of the California Institute of Technology had led a team of scientists to discover a small body of rock and ice located 8 billion miles (13 billion kilometers) from Earth. They had named the object Sedna after the Inuit goddess of the ocean. Sedna was the largest object found in the solar system since Pluto's discovery in 1930. However, astronomers reported that they could not designate Sedna as a planet because, like Pluto, Sedna is too small ~ with an estimated diameter of 1,100 miles (1,770 kilometers) ~ and possesses an irregular orbit. The scientists stated that the discovery might also have been the first observation of a region called the Oort Cloud, which is located outside of Pluto's orbit. Astronomers had long hypothesized the existence of this region of small frozen objects, the source of comets that enter Earth's solar system. The team had discovered Sedna using the Samuel Oschin Telescope at the California Institute of Technology's Palomar Observatory. (NASA, “Most Distant Object in Solar System Discovered,” news release 04-091, 15 March 2009; Thomas H. Maugh II, “Scientists Discover Icy Planetoid Beyond Pluto,” Los Angeles Times, 16 March 2009.
A NASA-funded study found that some climate-forecasting models might have incorrectly estimated future increases in Earth's temperatures. Scientists Kenneth R. Minschwaner of the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology and Andrew E. Dessler of the University of Maryland had determined that some climate models might have incorrectly estimated the amount of water vapor that enters Earth's atmosphere as the planet warms. For years, scientists had debated the extent to which water vapor ~ the most important heat-trapping greenhouse gas in Earth's atmosphere ~ influences Earth's surface temperatures. Using data from NASA's Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite, the scientists had found that, although the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere had increased with surface warming, the increase had not been as high as previous researchers had assumed. The findings also cast doubt on research suggesting that Earth's temperatures would decrease because of a lack of water vapor in the atmosphere. (NASA, “Satellite Finds Warming 'Relative' to Humidity,” news release N04-090, 15 March 1990; New York Times, “Study Disputes Idea of Global Warming,” 18 March 2004.
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