Nasa's pioneering satellite, designed to map carbon dioxide concentrations, has crashed.

Nasa's pioneering satellite, designed to map carbon dioxide concentrations, has crashed into the ocean near Antarctica after running into technical difficulties during launch.The Orbiting Carbon Observatory (Oco) blasted off aboard a Taurus XL rocket from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. The payload fairing failed to separate from the vehicle during ascent." The 160 centimetre-wide payload fairing is the nose cone that protects the satellite as it blasts through the atmosphere and should have split in two before falling away from the satellite. Because of the additional weight of the fairing, the rocket and satellite failed to reach orbit and subsequently plummeted into the Southern Ocean.

"Certainly for the science community it's a huge disappointment," said John Brunschwyler, Taurus project manager for Orbital Sciences Corp, which built the rocket and satellite. "It's taken so long to get here." The project took nine years to reach the launch pad. "The loss of this instrument is a serious setback," added Professor John Burrows, a co-investigator for the satellite. "Oco planned to build on the first measurements by the European Sciamachy instrument on Envisat and is complementary to the recently launched Japanese mission, Gosat." The technology onboard Oco was unique and boasted the ability to take more frequent and sensitive readings of CO2 levels than Envisat and Gosat. Nasa's director of Earth sciences, Michael Freilich, said: "Over the next several days, weeks and months, we're going to carefully evaluate how to move forward and advance the science, given our evaluation of the assets that are in orbit now, the assets of our international partners and the existence of flight spares in order to put together a programme, as rapidly as possible, to pick up where Oco left off." The £190m satellite was designed to collect precise measurements of the greenhouse gas in the Earth's atmosphere, identifying where it is being emitted, where it being absorbed and what happens to it in between. "It's critical that we understand the processes controlling carbon dioxide in our atmosphere today so we can predict how fast it will build up in the future and how quickly we'll have to adapt to climate change," said David Crisp, principal investigator for the Oco based at Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

Experts believe a successor to Oco is likely. "Given its relatively low cost, I would expect a second Oco to be approved," said Dr Chris Welch, principal lecturer in Astronautics at Kingston University's Faculty of Engineering.

World's first satellite to map concentrations of carbon dioxide in the Earth's atmosphere

The world's first satellite designed to map concentrations of carbon dioxide in the Earth's atmosphere is being launched by Nasa. The Orbiting Carbon Observatory (Oco) will collect precise measurements of the greenhouse gas in the Earth's atmosphere, identifying where it is coming from, where it is absorbed and what happens to it in between.
This improved tracking of CO2 will help scientists develop maps how the gas is concentrated around the world and give a better picture of how it affects the Earth's climate. Policymakers and governments will be able to use the data when setting and monitoring CO2 emissions targets designed to tackle climate change.
The Oco will blast off on a Taurus XL rocket from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California in the early hours of Monday morning. It will help scientists answer one of the biggest mysteries about the movement of CO2 in the Earth's atmosphere. Of all of the greenhouse gas emitted into the air since the industrial revolution in the 19th century, around 40% has stayed thee. Half of the remainder has been absorbed by the Earth's oceans but the rest has not yet been be accounted for. Scientists think the gas must have been absorbed on land but no one really knows where these missing carbon sinks are or what controls them.
"It's important to make clear that the 'missing' sinks aren't really missing, they are just poorly understood," said Scott Denning, an atmospheric scientist at Colorado State University. "We know the 'missing' sinks are terrestrial, land areas where forests, grasslands, crops and soil are absorbing carbon dioxide. But finding these sinks is like finding a needle in a haystack. It would be great if we could measure how much carbon every tree, shrub, peat bog or blade of grass takes in, but the world is too big and too diverse and is constantly changing, making such measurements virtually impossible. The solution is not in measuring carbon in trees. The solution is measuring carbon in the air."
Previous Nasa missions, such as the Atmospheric Infrared Sounder, have also measured the amount of carbon dioxide in the Earth's atmosphere but only at altitudes of 5km to 10km above the surface. "Oco is the first Nasa mission that has been dedicated, and optimised to make precise measurements of carbon dioxide throughout the atmospheric column, between the surface and space, with the greatest sensitivity near the Earth's surface, where most of the carbon dioxide sources and sinks are thought to be located," said Crisp.
Oco will collect about 8 million measurements every 16 days for at least two years. It will use three high-resolution spectrometers to split light into its various constituent colours. By anlaysing this light to detect the unique signature of gases such as carbon dioxide and oxygen in the atmosphere, scientists will be able to determine their relative concentrations and identify sources and sinks of CO2.
"Oco is primarily an exploratory science mission, whose objective is to test and validate a new technique for measuring carbon dioxide in the Earth's atmosphere from space. If we find that this approach works as well as we predict, it should provide scientists with the data that they need to produce the first global maps of carbon dioxide sources and sinks on regional scales, or spatial scales comparable to the size of Great Britain," said Crisp.