NASA ponders 'carbon copy' of crashed mission

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http://www.nature.com/news/2009/090415/full/458814a.html

Published online 15 April 2009 | Nature 458, 814-815 (2009) | doi:10.1038/458814a

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NASA ponders 'carbon copy' of crashed mission

Replica spacecraft for monitoring carbon dioxide could fly in a couple of years if money can be found.

Eric Hand

Since the Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO) crashed into the ocean minutes after its 24 February launch, researchers at NASA and elsewhere have been working on how else they might get the data on atmospheric carbon dioxide levels that the mission was meant to collect.

Within a week of losing the satellite, NASA, which spent US$278 million and seven years developing OCO, put together a committee of two dozen climate scientists to weigh up various options. Should they rebuild OCO with existing designs and launch it as quickly as possible? Start a new design that would take longer to develop? Or fund ground and sub-orbital carbon measurements, while working with existing greenhouse-gas monitoring satellites such as Europe's Envisat and Japan's Greenhouse gases Observing Satellite (GOSAT, also known as IBUKI).

The case against reincarnating OCO is that the spectroscopy it used to measure carbon levels needed reflected sunlight to work, preventing it from making measurements at dawn, dusk and night. Many scientists, including OCO's principal investigator David Crisp, of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, think that probing the atmosphere with lasers will eventually offer a way to get round-the-clock data and thus see important effects such as those of nocturnal respiration by soil organisms.

But laser-based systems are technologically challenging. In a recent competition to design atmospheric-science satellites the European Space Agency eliminated a laser-based carbon-dioxide-monitoring mission, A-Scope, citing insufficient readiness. The technology for a similar NASA mission called ASCENDS (Active Sensing of CO₂ Emissions over Nights, Days and Seasons) is still in development.

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