"PhysOrg.com) -- During the Maunder Minimum, a period of diminished solar activity between 1645 and 1715, sunspots were rare on the face of the sun, sometimes disappearing entirely for months to years. At the same time, Earth experienced a bitter cold period known as the "Little Ice Age."
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In 2003, a first generation TIM instrument went aloft with the Solar Radiation and Climate Experiment (SORCE) satellite. Learning from that instrument, engineers have tweaked the optical and electrical sensors to make the Glory TIM even more capable of measuring the true solar brightness and its fluctuations.

"The Glory TIM should be three times more accurate than SORCE TIM, and about ten times more accurate than earlier instruments," said Greg Kopp, a physicist at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and leader of the TIM science team."
http://www.physorg.com/news157041575.html

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