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October 24, 2010 | Space tourism to speed up climate change | London: With space tourism being the latest fad, soot from commercial space flight will change global temperatures. Researchers have estimated that climate change caused by black carbon, also known as soot, during a decade of commercial space flight would be comparable to that from current global aviation. The findings suggest that emissions from 1,000 private rocket launches a year would persist high in the stratosphere, potentially altering global atmospheric circulation and distributions of ozone. "There are fundamental limits
to how much material human beings can put into orbit without having a significant
impact," Nature quoted Martin Ross, an atmospheric scientist at the Aerospace
Corporation in Los Angeles, as saying. Commercial rockets burn a mixture of kerosene
and liquid oxygen. But several private space-flight companies, such as Virgin
Galactic, may soon use a more economical 'hybrid' rocket engine that ignites synthetic
hydrocarbon with nitrous oxide, said Ross. These hybrid engines emit more black
carbon than a kerosene and oxygen engine, he added. "Rain and weather wash out
these particles from the atmosphere near Earth's surface, but in the stratosphere
there isn't any rain and they can remain for 3 to 10 years," said Michael Mills,
an atmospheric chemist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR)
in Boulder. The researchers ran global atmospheric models of an injection of about
600 tonnes of black carbon per year at a single location, Las Cruces. The results
showed a soot layer in the stratosphere that stays within 10° latitude of the
launch site, says Ross. Furthermore, around 80 percent of the black carbon remained
in the Northern Hemisphere, spreading out to between 25° and 45° northern latitude.
The black carbon layer caused the temperature to decrease about 0.4 °C in the
tropics and subtropics, whereas the temperature at the poles increased by between
0.2 and 1 °C, he said, emphasizing that the exact details would have to be refined
with further models. The black carbon also caused ozone reductions of up to 1.7
percent in the tropics and subtropics, and increases of 5-6 percent in the polar
regions. The findings were reported in the Geophysical Research Letters1.
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