The United States space agency NASA has finally got its satellite designed to track carbon dioxide, a leading greenhouse gas that is responsible for global warming, into earth orbit.
The Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 (OCO-2) was finally launched aboard a Delta Two rocket from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, after the launch had to be delayed for a day due to issues on the launch pad.
The successful takeoff was a boon to NASA, after two previous bids to send a carbon-tracking spacecraft into orbit failed due to rocket malfunctions in 2009 and 2011.
The satellite has now joined the A-Train, a constellation of five other international Earth-observing satellites.
“The OCO-2 mission will produce the most detailed picture to date of natural sources of carbon dioxide, as well as their ‘sinks’, places on Earth’s surface where carbon dioxide is removed from the atmosphere,” NASA said.
“The observatory will study how these sources and sinks are distributed around the globe and how they change over time.”
The OCO-2 will take 24 measurements of carbon in the atmosphere every second, about a million a day, but clouds are a major obstacle.
Its field of view is about three square kilometres, so even wispy clouds can obscure its measurements.
NASA expects about 100,000 of the satellite’s data snapshots from around the world daily will be sufficiently cloud-free to be useful.
Dr Kevin Gurney, an associate professor at Arizona State University, said the satellite would contribute to a series of NASA-funded efforts to measure fossil fuel emissions.
“This research and OCO-2 together will act like partners in closing the carbon budget, with my data products estimating movements from the bottom up and OCO-2 estimating sources from the top down,” Dr Gurney said.
