NASA Carbon Sleuth Gets Simulated Taste of Space

A NASA observatory that will make the most precise and complete measurements of carbon dioxide in Earth’s atmosphere passes a key milestone in preparation for launch.

A NASA observatory that will make the most precise, highest-resolution and most complete, space-based measurements of carbon dioxide in Earth’s atmosphere has marked a key milestone in preparation for its planned July 1, 2014, launch.

The Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO)-2 spacecraft was moved into a thermal vacuum chamber at Orbital Science Corporation’s Satellite Manufacturing Facility in Gilbert, Arizona, in late November. That movement is shown above. The spacecraft passed a series of environmental tests designed to confirm the integrity of its electrical connections and to subject the OCO-2 instrument and spacecraft to the extreme hot, cold, airless environment they will encounter once in orbit.

OCO-2 is NASA’s first mission dedicated to studying atmospheric carbon dioxide and is the latest mission in NASA’s study of the global carbon cycle. The mission will uniformly sample the atmosphere above Earth’s land and ocean, collecting between 100,000 and 200,000 measurements of carbon dioxide concentration over Earth’s sunlit hemisphere every day for at least two years. It will do so with the accuracy, resolution and coverage needed to provide the first complete picture of the regional-scale geographic distribution and seasonal variations of both human and natural sources of carbon dioxide emissions as well as the places where carbon dioxide is removed from the atmosphere and stored.

Scientists around the world will use OCO-2 data to improve global carbon cycle models, better characterize the processes responsible for adding and removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and make more accurate predictions of global climate change.