NASA’s muddled vision?

It was easy to rally behind the NASA in the 1960s, when President Kennedy set the entire country on a course toward the moon. The Apollo missions were celebrated widely and with vigor. NASA knew its purpose, and our country led the world in it. 

There are all sorts of reasons NASA is having a harder time commanding our hearts and minds. For starters, there are a lot more choices of things to do and places to see in the solar system — and there’s a lot more competition. Lately, we’re in a sort of space race not just with Russia, but with China, Europe, India and Japan. Furthermore, as ground-based and orbiting telescopes have pushed ever farther into the heavens, the American people have gotten more difficult to impress.

Most importantly, the exquisite, trend-setting technical expertise of NASA has generated high demand. We expect that NASA will spin off technologies for our LED light and GPS systems. We want NASA to protect us;  Congress ordered the agency years ago to find all the asteroids or comets that could collide with Earth, and that’s pretty much done now. Oh! And while you’re at it, NASA — would you please keep an eye on the weather, and babysit our emissions to make sure we don’t worsen the fouling of our own nest? Thanks. 

Before I go on, let me clarify that NASA still does a fantastic job with many aspects of its mission that were initially so strong. Between the Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes, the Mars orbiters and rovers, the Cassini-Huygens mission to Saturn and New Horizons, on its way to Pluto, NASA is still an international leader in scientific discovery.

As a journalist, I am continually impressed with the availability of the scientists, knowledgeable spokespeople and multimedia resources useful for telling the stories of discovery. Among science agencies in the country and space agencies acround the world, NASA is unrivaled in terms of public access. 

But what about Earth?

NASA’s Earth-observing component really took a nosedive with the loss of the Orbiting Carbon Observatory. (I wrote more about the failed launch the day it happened.) The OCO was to orbit the Earth and look in fine detail — at the scale of a square mile — at both the places where carbon is being released into the atmosphere, and the places where it is being absorbed. 

The mission represented NASA’s best effort to find the “missing sink” for carbon that’s emitted by people. In a nutshell, humans are putting 8 to 9 billion tons of carbon — or at least 32 billion tons of carbon dioxide — into the atmosphere each year. Most of it comes from the burning of fossil fuels, and a lesser component -less than 20 percent — comes from land use practices like agriculture and deforestation. 

But not all of that carbon is showing up in the atmosphere. 

“If we’re really dumping 32 billion tons of carbon dioxide per year into the atmosphere, the carbon dioxide abundance in atmosphere should be increasing at a rate we can calculate,” said David Crisp, Orbiting Carbon Observatory project manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, who took a few minutes to talk to me yesterday. He explained that the baseline, average carbon dioxide content in the atmosphere is about 385 parts per million (ppm).

“We should be seeing about a 4ppm increase in co2 every year from our emissions,” Crisp said. “We don’t. We only see about a 2 ppm increase in carbon dioxide per year. Something out there is absorbing over half of the carbon dioxide.”

Absorption is relatively easy to track in the ocean, because the water becomes more acidic. The risks of this trend for marine life have been the subject of several recent studies predicting ominous die-offs if carbon emissions aren’t reined in. (See also this article, from late February, and this BBC News writeup on new research in corals.)

But the ocean — while it’s absorbing some carbon dioxide — isn’t doing all the work; it’s only absorbing about half the human carbon emissions that aren’t making it into the atmosphere. The other half is simply — poof — disappearing. 

“We don’t know where, we don’t know how, we don’t known why, and we don’t know how long the Earth will continue to clean up after us,” Crisp said. And that’s a big reason to figure out where the carbon is going, he thinks.

“We’re talking about signing treaties on controlling carbon dioxide emissions, but right now natural processes are absorbing half of them. “If these carbon dioxide sinks stop working, we’ve got a bigger problem than we thought we did.”

And if there are certain regions on Earth that will reliably give industry a free pass — well, we want to know about that too, he thinks. We wouldn’t want to go plowing down tropical rainforests if they’re saving us. But what if the opposite is true?

“Let’s pretend we learn that clearing rainforest and growing soybeans is a really good thing for carbon dioxide in the atmosphere,” Crisp said. “Corn in Iowa every summer pulls CO2 levels over Iowa as low as they were in the 1970s.”

So Crisp thinks a mission like the OCO is key to addressing fundamental decisions about carbon policy — like whether to slash rainforests to make way for biofuel crops like soybean, or leave it alone as a life-saving refuge for our emissions.

What about other Earth-observing missions?

Truth be told, the OCO was a bit redundant — sort of.

The Japanese launched the world’s first Greenhouse Gases Observing Satellite, called IBUKI (formerly GOSAT) on January 23. Crisp says the mission is churning our solid data but at a fairly crude scale, compared to what the OCO would have done. Specifically, IBUKI isn’t sensitive enough to detect the missing sinks.

Still, “we can learn a tremendous amount from the GOSAT data,” he adds. “We’re hoping that my team can continue to work with their data to try to exploit it to the extent possible.”

NASA’s own Atmospheric Infrared Sounder has been measuring carbon dioxide since 2002, but from two to 10 miles over Earth. At that altitude, carbon dioxide is most efficient as a greenhouse gas. But to get at what’s happening with emissions and sinks, you need to measure closer to Earth.

NASA does use a ground-based network to monitor greenhouse gas emissions, but those return about 100 measurements a week. GOSAT is yielding about 5,600 measurements a day. The OCO would have returned half a million measurements every day.

Best of all, the OCO’s coverage and sensitivity would have yielded some of the first-ever comprehensive data about carbon dioxide over the jungly tropics — where ground-based measurements are often difficult or dangerous, and where some of the missing carbon sinks are likely to be found.

NASA runs two other missions that are contributing to our understanding of the carbon cycle (see a recent press release for more information), and the European Space Agency is working on a series of orbiting missions to shed light on other aspects of Earth’s major physical processes and climate (including climate change). I wrote a recent story about that program at Universe Today.

But currently there are no other missions in the sky that promise to find the missing carbon.

What happens next?

If Crisp had his way, NASA would be scrambling to rebuild the OCO and get it back in the sky.

“We need to replace something like OCO absolutely as soon as possible,” he said. “We’re tired of following.”

But the numbers don’t seem as eager. All of NASA’s Earth-observing programs garnered just $1.4 billion of the $17 billion Omnibus appropriations bill for fiscal year 2009 (which was finally approved last month). The agency got $1 billion from the recently passed stimulus package, but Crisp said it’s looking doubtful that another $250 million will be used to replace the lost OCO.

“A quick reflight,” he said, “is not in the offing.”

Nevertheless, NASA will be re-evaluating its goals, along with Washington. And Crisp and others are hoping that NASA’s role in Earth observation will be re-established — and soon.