Every one of the instruments on here
has had to be spec'd to work
at phenomenal levels.
So we're going to be flying in the background atmosphere.
That usually means there's very little
of whatever you're trying to measure.
For something like CO2
we need such high sensitivity -
there's lots of CO2 there,
so every tiny change in it makes a difference.
For something like ozone,
we're going to be looking at very small numbers
in the background atmosphere.
For something like NOx, NO and NO2,
the numbers are the lowest, even today,
the lowest that instrument has ever measured
was earlier on in the flight today.
So the instrument is a cavity enhanced system,
so we take light from the laser
and put it through a sampling cell.
And then we look and see how much light disappears
when we have a certain amount
of any of the four gases that we measure.
For a given amount of CO2
that's in the atmosphere,
a certain amount will be absorbed
of the laser light
and then we can tell from that
how much CO2 there is.
We do a lot of profiles over TCCON sites,
which are sites that look up at the sun
and give us a total column of CO2 and methane
between that site and the sun.
But we also fly underneath some of the satellites.
So today we've been doing an underpass
under the OCO-2 satellite,
where they measure CO2 columns.
So we'll be sending all of the CO2 profiles
that we measure
to the OCO2 team
to help with the validation of their instrument.
A project like ATom
is ideally suited for that,
so it just takes a little extra coordination
to try and get the most out of that.
Looking at the real time data
does give us ideas about
what we should be interested in
when it comes to looking at the data.
Because there is a huge amount of data
that's going to be produced from ATom,
so I think there'll be a lot
of the wider science community
who end up using this data set,
and I can see it being invaluable
to all the modeling community.
From what I've heard from them,
they are very excited about the whole project.