NASA’s Earth-observing satellite crashes after launch

NASA's Orbiting Carbon Observatory was to be the first spacecraft dedicated to studying atmospheric carbon dioxide, the principal human-produced driver of climate change. After a launch failure that's being investigated now, the craft plummeted into the ocean near Antarctica. Image credit: NASA/JPL

Well, that was about the saddest news briefing I’ve ever seen.

At a hastily-arranged press conference, three NASA officials spoke on NASA TV this morning about the failed launch of the Orbiting Carbon Observatory, a satellite that was supposed to fill in some missing links about the role of human-emitted carbon in climate change.

Undoubtedly, the NASA officials had been up all night. Chuck Dovale, NASA launch director, called the failure a “huge disappointment for the entire team.”

The launch sequence began shortly before 2 a.m., Pacific time, from the Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, with only a minor power hitch that didn’t prevent liftoff. Thee minutes later, though, NASA officials began to get signals that something was wrong. Although computers on Earth sent the proper signals for the craft to shed its clamshell fairing, or casing, the device failed to separate. 

“As a direct result of carryng that extra weight, we could not make orbit,” said John Brunschwyler, Taurus program manager. (The OCO launched aboard an Orbital Sciences Corporation Taurus XL rocket.) The craft landed in the ocean just short of Antarctica. 

The officials announced that an inquiry would be organized to study the failure, and the agency will be evaluating the best way to proceed with Earth-observing goals. The $270 million mission was to fly for two years, taking a closer look at human carbon emissions and where they go. 

According to NASA, in the 10,000 years before the Industrial Revolution in 1751, carbon dioxide levels rose less than one percent. Since then, they’ve risen 37 percent. About 40 percent of that carbon has stayed in the atmosphere, and half of the rest has been absorbed by the ocean (where scientists are increasingly worried about the secondary effects of acidification). That leaves 30 percent of the carbon unaccounted for, and researchers are curious about where it’s going. Finding the “missing” carbon sink was one of the primary goals of the OCO mission. Overall, it was to provide the first global picture of the human and natural sources of carbon dioxide and the places where the gas is stored.

“ Certainly for the science community, it’s a huge disappointment,” said Michael Freilich, director of NASA’s Earth Science Division in Washington. “OCO was an important mission to measure important elements of the carbon cycle.”

He said the agency will move as rapidly as possible to pick up where OCO left off, whether that means duplicating the craft or updating its goals for a different future mission. It’s too soon to say how the launch failure will affect NASA’s Glory mission to study aerosols and black carbon in the atmosphere and collect data on solar irradiance, to tease out whether climate change is a by-product of man-made or natural events. That mission was set to launch June 15 of this year.

Meanwhile, the European Space Agency is set to begin its own Earth-observing program, called the “Living Planet Program.” The first of five satellites, the Gravity field and steady-state Ocean Circulation Explorer (GOCE), is scheduled to go up March 16. Later this year, the ESA’s Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) satellite will go up. Six other missions are planned as part of the program:

• ADM-Aeolus (Atmospheric Dynamics Mission), with a 2010 launch date, will collect data about the global wind profile to improve weather forecasting.
• CryoSat-2, set to launch in late 2009, will determine variations in the thickness of the Earth’s continental ice sheets and marine ice cover to further our understanding of the relationship between ice and global warming. CryoSat-2 replaces CryoSat, which was lost at launch in 2005.
• Swarm, due for launch in 2010, is a constellation of three satellites to study the dynamics of the magnetic field to gain new insights into the Earth system by studying Earth’s interior and its environment.  
• EarthCARE (Earth Clouds Aerosols and Radiation Explorer), launching in 2013, is a joint European-Japanese mission that aims to improve the representation and understanding of the Earth’s radiative balance in climate and numerical weather forecast models.