Article Summary
For 12 years, Shepherd took pictures of winds blowing at hurricane speeds 100 kilometres above the Earth, winds that pulsated in regular tides, winds no one knew existed when his research began.
The insights gleaned from those pictures are currently being applied to improve weather forecasting models and help unravel the intricacies of climate change.
Little was known about what happened in the atmosphere between 80 kilometres and 300 kilometres above the Earth because there was no easy way to make wide-scale measurements there. Radio-equipped balloons generally explode from expansion at around 25 kilometres, and even the thin air remaining above 100 kilometres is enough to cause satellites to burn up.
So, UARS orbited safely at 600 kilometres and WINDII pointed its camera down at the edge of the rotating Earth below.
What made the camera so special was a filtering system that let only very select light pass through to the recording device, a Charge Coupled Display - cutting-edge technology back then but now commonplace in consumer digital cameras.
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