NASA has announced the successful launch of a much-anticipated satellite intended to perform the first extremely precise, worldwide measurements of the levels of carbon dioxide gas in Earth's atmosphere.
The Orbiting Carbon Observatory, launched from California's Vandenberg Air Force Base atop a Delta 2 rocket, has been placed in a polar orbit that sees it crossing Earth's equator once a day, the space agency said.
An attempted launch Tuesday was aborted due to problems with water systems on the launch pad meant to cool down the extreme temperatures during launch, but Wednesday's launch went off without a hitch, scientists said.
This was the second attempt to put on OCO satellite into orbit; the first OCO was lost in 2009 when a launch malfunction caused it to crash into the Pacific Ocean.
"Seldom do we get a second chance to be able to do a mission like this," Geoffery Yoder, a NASA deputy associate administrator, said after Wednesday's liftoff.
In a planned 2-year mission the OCO-2 satellite, built by Orbital Sciences Corp., will observe the same swathes of Earth passing under its orbit every 16 days to track local changes in the levels of CO2, the greenhouse gas believed to be behind recent warming trends around the planet.
"With the launch of this spacecraft, decision-makers and scientists will get a much better idea of the role of carbon dioxide in climate change, as OCO-2 measures this greenhouse gas globally and provides incredibly new insights into where and how carbon dioxide is moving into, and then out of, the atmosphere," said program executive Betsy Edwards at NASA headquarters in Washington, D.C.
An instrument aboard the $465 million OCO-2 known as a grading spectrometer can measure CO2 levels with a precision of 1 part per million, NASA officials said.
The information may yield clues to how the Earth's oceans and forests manage to reabsorb half of the CO2 that burning fossil fuels puts into our atmosphere, and have kept on doing so even as the amount of carbon dioxide emitted by human activity continues to rise, said project scientist Michael Gunson at the space agency's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.
"Trying to get to a point of understanding the details of those processes will give us some insight into the future and what's likely to happen over next decades, even if we continue to consume more and more fossil fuels and emit more and more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere," he said.
