Monitoring Earth: Gaia’s breath
THE ten-and-a-half minutes it took a Delta 2 rocket to lift OCO-2 from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California to a parking orbit 190km above Earth on July 2nd would have been too long for most people (even Tibetans—see article) to hold their breath. But you could not have blamed the team of scientists and engineers that built the satellite for wanting to. Five years ago they watched as the original OCO—the Orbiting Carbon Observatory, designed to map the concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide around the world and its change over time—lifted off from the same place, only to end up sunk in the sea off Antarctica after the rocket carrying it failed.
Thanks to money made available by America’s fiscal stimulus, OCO is a rare example of a lost mission that got a second chance. A near-identical version—a carbon copy, you might say—was rushed into production. After a second atmospheric-research satellite was lost because of another problem with the make of rocket that had served OCO so poorly, though, the replacement had to wait for a few years while a more reliable alternative was procured.
That delay produced not just a safer launch, but also a better satellite. In 2013 the devices (called reaction wheels) used to point Kepler, a space telescope, at its target stars started to fail—devices on which OCO-2, too, would rely. They have been modified. And OCO-2 has also become even more scientifically promising in the interim—not because of better instruments, but because of a new appreciation of what the old instruments can do.
Read more . . .
The Latest on: OCO-2
via Google News
The Latest on: OCO-2
- EOSDIS Data News: November 2017on February 26, 2021 at 11:26 pm
NASA's Goddard Earth Science Data and Information Service Center (GES DISC) published the Nimbus 7 Temperature-Humidity Infrared Radiometer (THIR) Level 1 Cloud Data for SBUV/TOMS (BCLT) product was ...
- Impact of Amazonian Fires on Atmospheric CO2on February 18, 2021 at 1:50 am
These meteorological conditions will facilitate more fires in the Amazon rainforest. Using the Orbiting Carbon Observatory–2 (OCO‐2) column CO2, we notice that there are ∼ 2 ppm more CO2 over the ...
- Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO-2)on February 16, 2021 at 9:18 pm
The December Solstice 2020 edition of our member magazine showcases the year's best images. Join Bill Nye and leading experts in a virtual festival celebrating the next era of Mars exploration!
- OCO 2on February 5, 2021 at 4:00 pm
The OCO-2 Project primary science objective is to collect the first space-based measurements of atmospheric carbon dioxide with the precision, resolution and coverage needed to characterize its ...
- A Geospatial Functional Model For OCO-2 Data with Application on Imputation and Land Fraction Estimationon January 25, 2021 at 10:36 pm
@inproceedings{Chang2021AGF, title={A Geospatial Functional Model For OCO-2 Data with Application on Imputation and Land Fraction Estimation}, author={X. Chang and Z. Zhu and Xiongtao Dai and J. Hobbs ...
- Greenhouse Effect: Keeping the Balanceon August 17, 2020 at 8:55 am
How do we keep the right balance of greenhouse gases in our atmosphere? Scientists describe the carbon cycle in terms of sources (parts of the cycle that add carbon to the atmosphere) and sinks (parts ...
- What Is Ocean Acidification?on August 13, 2020 at 5:56 pm
NASA satellites are orbiting and collecting information about Earth all the time. One satellite, called Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 (OCO-2), collects information about carbon dioxide in our ...
- Astronomy Picture of the Dayon August 12, 2020 at 10:15 pm
Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer.
- Satellite: Level 3 SIFon May 29, 2020 at 7:10 pm
2020, RSE) Spatially Contiguous SIF from OCO-2 (SIF_OCO2_005): 16 day, 0.05 degree, 2004-2019 Spatially Contiguous SIF Derived from OCO-2 using machine learning constrained by physiological ...
- Measurement Approachon February 23, 2020 at 7:45 am
The principal science objective of the OCO-2 mission is to retrieve a global geographic distribution of CO 2 sources and sinks. The OCO-2 mission will not, however, directly measure CO 2 sources and ...
via Bing News
