NASA's failed satellite carried big hopes

by Frank James

The Orbiting Carbon Observatory satellite which failed to launch yesterday morning and crash landed somewhere near Antarctica had a lot of hopes attached to it.

Its destruction was overshadowed by all the attention paid to President Obama's speech yesterday. But for those concerned about global warming and efforts to slow down human contributions to it, that was one very important satellite.

The $278 million OCO was to be a key tool in learning more about carbon dioxide in the environment, especially the 60 percent of the compound that eventually winds up not in the atmosphere but somewhere else, like bodies of water or soil. The data it was going to collect and transmit would have been crucial for a better understanding of what scientists call the carbon cycle -- how carbon dioxide is created by human activity and naturally and then what becomes of it.

That information likely would have been valuable in terms of managing carbon, including a system that would allow companies and others to buy and sell the rights to emit carbon dioxide also know as cap and trade.

So the loss of the satellite was a major setback.

A recent Science Daily piece explains what scientists and policy makers were hoping to gain from the defunct satellite:

The observatory's ability to locate and monitor changes in carbon sources (places where carbon is generated) and sinks (places where carbon is absorbed or stored) will provide valuable information to support decision making by those responsible for managing carbon in the environment. It will assist them in developing effective strategies for managing global carbon dioxide and monitoring the effectiveness of those strategies.

Phil DeCola, a senior policy analyst in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, and former Orbiting Carbon Observatory program scientist at NASA Headquarters in Washington, said solving the scientific mystery of the missing sinks and their curious variability is likely to have large policy and economic impacts.

"If the nations of the world take serious action to limit the use of fossil fuels, the right to emit carbon dioxide will become scarcer, and emission rights would become an increasingly valuable traded commodity," DeCola said. "Observations of the location, amount and rate of carbon dioxide emission into the air, as well as the stock and flow of all forms of carbon on land and in the ocean, will be needed to manage such a world market fairly and efficiently."

NASA produced an excellent "science writers' guide" to explain the mission they had hoped the OCO would accomplish. It's somewhat an eerie experience to read it, knowing that the scientific equipment the guide describes is now lying somewhere on the bottom of the Indian Ocean.

An excerpt from the guide:

Of all the carbon emitted by human activities between 1751 and 2003, only about 40 percent has remained in the atmosphere. The remaining 60 percent has been apparently absorbed (at least temporarily) by the ocean and continents. Recent inventories of the ocean can account for about half of this missing carbon. The remainder must have been absorbed somewhere on land, but scientists don't know where most of the land sinks are located or what controls their efficiency over time.

An improved understanding of carbon sinks is essential to predicting future carbon dioxide increases and making accurate predictions of carbon dioxide's impact on Earth's climate. If these natural carbon dioxide sinks become less efficient as the climate changes, the rate of buildup of carbon dioxide would increase--in fact, today's carbon dioxide levels would be about 100 parts per million higher were it not for them.

Scientists monitor carbon dioxide concentrations using a ground-based network consisting of about 100 sites all over the world. But the current network does not have the spatial coverage, resolution or sampling rates necessary to identify the natural sinks responsible for absorbing carbon dioxide, or the processes that control how the efficiency of those sinks changes from year to year.

The Orbiting Carbon Observatory will dramatically improve measurements of carbon dioxide over space and time, uniformly sampling Earth's land and ocean and collecting about 8,000,000 measurements of atmospheric carbon dioxideconcentration over Earth's entire sunlit hemisphere every16 days.

Scientific models have shown that we can reduce uncertainties in our understanding of the balance of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere by up to 80 percent through the use of precise, space-based measurements. Data from the existing ground-based monitoring network can be augmented with high-resolution, global, space-based measurements of atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration accurate to 0.3 to 0.5 percent (about one to two parts per million out of the background level of about 385 parts per million) on regional to continental scales. This level of precision is necessary because atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations rarely vary by more than two percent from one pole of Earth to the other. The Orbiting Carbon Observatory will have this level of precision.