NASA advances world's first spaceborne sodium lidar

It's used as a coolant in nuclear power plants and as a desiccant to remove humidity that otherwise would ruin moisture-sensitive products. Found in every cell in the human body, it transmits nerve impulses and regulates blood pressure. And as it turns out, sodium—the sixth most abundant element in Earth's crust—also is useful as a tracer for characterizing Earth's mesosphere, a poorly understood region of Earth's atmosphere that's sensitive to both the influences from the sun above and the atmospheric layers below.

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