During the summer of 2018, a widespread drought developed over Northern and Central Europe. The increase in temperature and the reduction of soil moisture have influenced carbon dioxide (CO2) exchange between the atmosphere and terrestrial ecosystems in various ways, such as a reduction of photosynthesis, changes in ecosystem respiration, or allowing more frequent fires.
Royal Belgian Institute for Space AeronomyPhysics and chemistry of the atmosphere of the Earth and other planets, and of outer space.
While the Royal Belgian Institute for Space Aeronomy is a relatively young one, it has a rich history, entangled and interwoven with the emergence of the space age. In this article, you'll find a short introduction to its beginnings, as well as a fragment of archival footage from the BRT (Belgische Radio- en Televisieomroep), and a video showing the Institute today.
Things are kicking into a higher gear in our MAJIS lab. A team of scientists and engineers from the Royal Belgian Institute for Space Aeronomy has been working for some time on the development of a characterisation facility for one of two detectors of a space instrument called MAJIS, planned to be launched on board the JUICE spacecraft to the Jupiter’s system in 2022.
The NOMAD instrument, developed at the Royal Belgian Institute for Space Aeronomy and currently in orbit around Mars on board ESA's ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter, has detected a unique green glow of oxygen in the atmosphere surrounding the red planet (around 80 km altitude). This emission gives its characteristic colour to the terrestrial polar aurora and airglow, but was never observed before in other planetary atmospheres outside of the Earth.
Scientists from the Royal Belgian Institute for Space Aeronomy (BIRA-IASB), in collaboration with the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute (KNMI) and the European Space Agency (ESA) have determined the extent to which the COVID-19 crisis has had an impact on air quality. The results were published on May 8, 2020, in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.
A question came up this week: “is it just an impression, or is the sky clearer and “bluer” since the start of the lockdown?” To be clear, we’re not talking about the weather or clouds, but the colour of the sky itself.
To answer the question, our scientist, Christine Bingen, first wrote an article about where the blue colour of the sky comes from.