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Chemistry.

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Biology.

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Physics.

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A NASA mission has gathered experts in all three disciplines...and more....for an ambitious project

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to study Earth's climate. It's called the North Atlantic Aerosols and Marine Ecosystem Study.

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NASA calls it NAAMES.

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It's a complex mission with a million moving parts, but there are three big ones to note.

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First, there's the research vessel Atlantis, a laboratory at sea.

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Then there's NASA's own C130 Hercules, a laboratory in the sky.

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And one more...but we'll get to that. It's big hardware for sure,

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but the stars of the show, besides a crackerjack team of scientists, are these guys:

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...phytoplankton. In the north Atlantic there are trillions, and springtime is when they bloom.

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Phytoplankton produce a gas called dimethymsulfide, or DMS,

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and as that gas passes into the atmosphere, it rapidly breaks down.

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The resulting sulfur compounds become aerosols, microscopic particles

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in essence, and water condenses around them.

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And you know what you get when countless water droplets condense in the atmosphere? Clouds.

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There's a startling connection: phytoplankton affect cloud formation! But phytoplankton growth depends on

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available carbon, and the warmer the temperatures of the ocean, the less carbon that water can hold.

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Less carbon could restrict phytoplankton growth, which in turn could affect global cloud cover,

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among other things. When one part of the system changes, everything shifts, and that's why NASA

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has teams out in the field, studying how that system works from all sorts of angles.

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So what's the mission's third big moving part?

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That would be The Agency's fleet of spacecraft, currently in orbit gathering global information 24-7-365.

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Lessons learned from NAAMES and related research will help experts develop the next generation

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of spacecraft, some of which are already on the drawing board.

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Most people know NASA for its interplanetary adventures.