Your name can float around in space: Nasa

Washington, Sept. 26: For people who want their names to float around in space, Nasa has created a website that would enable anyone to place their name on the agency's Glory satellite.

The "Send Your Name Around the Earth" website enables everyone to take part in the science mission and place their names in orbit for years to come. The website, where participants can submit their information, is lo- cated at: http://polls.nasa.gov/utilities/sendtospace/jsp/sendName.jsp

Participants will receive a printable certificate from Nasa and have their name recorded on a microchip that will become part of the spacecraft. Nasa's Glory satellite is the first mission dedicated to understanding the effects of particles in the atmosphere and the sun's variability on our climate.

The Glory satellite will allow scientists to measure airborne particles more accurately from space than ever before. The particles, known as "aerosols," are tiny bits of material found in earth's atmosphere. "Undoubtedly, greenhouse gases cause the biggest climatic effect," said Michael Mishchenko, the Glory project scientist at Nasa's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York. "But, the uncertainty in the aerosol effect is the biggest uncertainty in climate at the present," he added. Glory will carry two scientific instruments, the Aerosol Polarimetry Sensor, or APS, and the Total Irradiance Monitor, or TIM, and two cameras for cloud identification.

The APS instrument will help quantify the role of aerosols as natural and human-produced agents of climate change more accurately than existing measurement tools. The TIM instrument will continue 30 years of measuring total solar irradiance, the amount of energy radiating from the sun to earth, with improved accuracy and stability. Understanding the sun's energy is an important key to understanding climate change on earth.

-ANI