A newly launched satellite will reveal even more about the planet’s workings than originally planned

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.

The Latest on: OCO-2

Susan Kulawik | NASA - NASA
January 20, 2021
OCO's SAF Program Launches Annual Stalking Awareness Month Campaign - Oswego Daily News
January 20, 2021
Faces of Leadership: The Directors of JPL - Jet Propulsion Laboratory
January 12, 2021
NASA satellite offers urban carbon dioxide insights - EurekAlert
March 6, 2020
ASSIMILATING SATELLITE DATA YIELDS A FIRST LOOK AT COVID-19'S IMPACT ON CARBON DIOXIDE - nasa.gov
July 21, 2020
NASA to Highlight Advances at Virtual Supercomputer Conference - NASA
November 16, 2020
[email protected]: Monitoring COVID-19-Related Changes in Carbon Dioxide from Space - nasa.gov
November 6, 2020
NASA's Orbiting Carbon Observatory-3 Gets First Data - Jet Propulsion Laboratory
July 12, 2019
NASA’s carbon-monitoring OCO-2 satellite confirms that El Nino weather boosts CO2 - GeekWire
October 12, 2017
Excitement Grows as NASA Carbon Sleuth Begins Year Two - Jet Propulsion Laboratory
October 29, 2015

via Google News

The Latest on: OCO-2

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Delta 2 rocket ready to launch OCO 2
on February 22, 2015 at 4:47 pm
the LA Daily News and Spaceflight Now set up their sound-activated cameras around Vandenberg Air Force Base's Space Launch Complex 2 pad to cover the Delta 2 rocket blasting off with the OCO 2 ...