The previous mission failed to make orbit, crashed into ocean.
A Delta II rocket blazed off the launch pad at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California early Wednesday morning to begin a landmark mission to survey carbon dioxide gas in Earth’s atmosphere.
NASA’s Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2, or OCO-2, is expected to provide insight into how the planet adjusts to the increased production of carbon dioxide from a vantage point in orbit that will allow it to take readings on a scale never achieved before.
While ground stations have been monitoring carbon dioxide concentrations, OCO-2 will be the first spacecraft to conduct a global-scale reading over several seasons. The spacecraft is expected to produce detailed readings to provide regional sources of carbon dioxide as well as sinks for the greenhouse gas.
“There’s quite a lot of urgency to see what we can get from a satellite like OCO-2,” said David Crisp, the science team lead for the mission.
The spacecraft flew into orbit aboard a United Launch Alliance Delta II rocket launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. The July 2 liftoff came at 5:56 a.m. Eastern time, 2:56 Pacific time. The hexagonal spacecraft is about 6 feet long and 3 feet in diameter and weighs 985 pounds. The Delta II first stage’s single liquid-fueled engine ignited moments before the three solid-fueled boosters roared to life to catapult the rocket and spacecraft off the pad toward space.
The launch was from the west coast so the spacecraft could enter a polar orbit of the Earth, a flight path that will see it cross over the Arctic and Antarctic regions during each revolution and get a complete picture of the Earth. It will fly about 438 miles above the planet’s surface to take its readings.
“The only way to accomplish a polar orbit from U.S. soil is to launch from Vandenberg,” said Tim Dunn, NASA’s launch manager for the flight.
The mission is the first of its kind in the agency’s extensive history of Earth-observing spacecraft. The spacecraft was launched to replace the first OCO that did not make it into orbit due to an anomaly in February 2009. The spacecraft carries one instrument and its sole focus is detecting carbon dioxide and watching from space as the Earth “breathes” to see what becomes of the gas.
The instrument is precise enough that researchers will be able to count the number of carbon dioxide molecules in the layers of the atmosphere and use the data to draw conclusions about how the increasing amount of gas will affect things like the global temperature. OCO-2’s mission is to last at least two years.
NASA’s Launch Services Program, based at Kennedy Space Center in Florida, managed the launch preparation and flight into orbit. The OCO-2 mission is handled by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California.
“We’ve been preparing for the OCO-2 mission for almost two years now,” Dunn said before launch. “The biggest challenge has been in bringing the Delta II launch vehicle out of retirement. The last time we launched on a Delta II was October 2011, a weather satellite.”
The Delta II has been one of NASA’s most reliable launchers ever, registering more than 150 launches for NASA, the Air Force and commercial satellite makers from 1989 to 2011.
The launch team has been visiting Vandenberg during the preparation and spent the two weeks before launch there, running through the last phases of processing and countdown rehearsals.
With the mission safely begun, Dunn congratulated the team soon after OCO-2 separated from the Delta II’s second stage and opened its pair of solar array wings.
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Now that we have a carbon dioxide spy in the sky, watch for its data to become either secret (if it doesn’t show what they expect) or front page news.
Interesting how the warming enthusiasts don’t believe you can accurately measure temperatures from space but do believe you can measure spatial CO2 concentrations
Gamecock says:
July 3, 2014 at 3:44 am
“The only way to accomplish a polar orbit from U.S. soil is to launch from Vandenberg,” said Tim Dunn, NASA’s launch manager for the flight.
“I’m no rocket surgeon, but this is stupid.”
Polar orbiting satellites are not launched from Kennedy Space Center because the trajectory would take the rocket over land. Hence, all US polar orbiting satellites are launched from Vandenberg AFB.
Gamecock says:
July 3, 2014 at 3:44 am
“The only way to accomplish a polar orbit from U.S. soil is to launch from Vandenberg,” said Tim Dunn, NASA’s launch manager for the flight.
I’m no rocket surgeon, but this is stupid.
===
[trimmed. Contribute to reduce the reader’s (lack of) knowledge, don’t just insult. .mod]
Odd, I quotes Gamecock and it got held in moderation, is “stupid” on the hit list now?
“Dave says:
July 3, 2014 at 5:23 am”
No on both counts. Refer to;
“Greg Goodman says:
July 2, 2014 at 11:13 pm
Correction , they are not even measuring gas concentration, they making spectrograph measurements and inferring gas concentration.”
It will be garbage! just like temperature!
Can’t wait for the shock-horror bombshell report: “It’s worse than we thought!”
“While ground stations have been monitoring carbon dioxide concentrations, OCO-2 will be the first spacecraft to conduct a global-scale reading over several seasons. The spacecraft is expected to produce detailed readings to provide regional sources of carbon dioxide as well as sinks for the greenhouse gas.”
Not so, should say the first US spacecraft since ,as FrankSW and Otto Weinzierl have pointed out, the Japanese Space Agency JAXA have had their IBUKI satellite flying since 2009 to measure global methane and carbon dioxide emissions and sinks.
http://global.jaxa.jp/press/2012/12/20121205_ibuki_e.html
The latest IBUKI report was in December 2012 and this does not support the IPCC view that the NH countries are responsible for most of the the increased atmospheric carbon dioxide but rather, as been suggested by Professor Salby, it has come from the ocean in the tropical regions. But doubtless the new US satellite will apply corrections to the data to remedy this situation in line with political demands.
Will result in an entire new level of ‘adjustments’……line up for the grant funds now!
I choose to be optimistic that the people putting this up and making sure it works are interested in real science. They are doing practical engineering, and are unlikely to be part of the Political agenda of the agency.
I am really hoping that we will get some genuine ‘facts’.
I’m sure I’m not the only one here who wants to know what is really happening with CO2, and not just have my own personal bias confirmed.
Unfortunately, I have to concede that the people decimating the information ‘will’ be part of the Political agenda.
meant disseminating, but thinking about it. Decimating isn’t a bad word to use when talking about these people.
If the satellite shows more CO2 absorbed than emitted from N Amer as the earlier Japanese satellite showed, wait for the scrambling & attempts to massage the data…
That is a safety concern of NASA. If you were to make a polar launch from Canaveral the rocket would have to pass over populated land areas on liftoff. If there were an unfortunate malfunction, you could wind up with rocket chunks and toxic debris landing on the I95 corridor – a lot of population in that area. From Vandenberg it flies over the ocean to get to polar orientation. Also Vandenberg is much farther north and that also helps polar launch attitudes. (Alaska would probably be ideal for 2-3 months mid summer, but infrastructure support and the fact of it being too cold for most of the year rules it out.)
Vandenberg has clear seas to the due south so can launch without worry of a launch failure landing on populated areas.
[Alaska had a NASA/military research launch site like Wallops Island. It is no longer frequently used. .mod]
I seem to have gotten into the sin bin while discussing polar orbit launch safety issues…I wonder what I said?
NO, no this statement is correct, but because of safety concerns during the first moments of the flight, not from orbital mechanics calculations. Many, many satellite and rocket launches have gone bad over the years – either needing to be blown up deliberately as they go off course, or because the satellite+rocket+booster+guidance package went wrong and the whole thing blew itself up. And that debris can go a long ways before it lands.
Fundamentally, the earth rotates from west to east (northern hemisphere), and as you launch closer to the equator, the increased radius you get from the earth’s axis means your velocity increases. That faster relative motion of earth surface to space increases because your baseline (the rocket pad) is further from the earth’s axis. A faster launching pad means the rocket needs to accelerate less to get to orbital velocity. Less acceleration = less fuel, less weight, or more payload. All very good things in a world where grams and fractions of grams count in getting off of the ground.
Each country wants to launch from within its own borders (facilities cost, jobs, transportation, lodging and services for the thousands of launch crew and technicians and the support employees for those people. And security also for military launches.) So, rocket bases for regular flights from the US are FL. TX was considered a launch spot as well – but debris from a falling rocket would land in TX, LA, MS, AL, and FL (plus the Caribbean islands and Cuba). So TX was ruled out by Jules Verne and the US military in favor of Cape Canaveral, and both chose to launch from FL to get to the moon. NASA has a smaller launch facility on the islands off-shore from VA for the same reason. The French use French Guiana – which is even closer to the equator and so “even faster.” That old French colonial possession means they can launch more payload with the same rocket than the US, and far more than the Soviets. Incidentally, the further away from the equator you launch, the greater the “S” (sine – like) wave your orbit has – and its maximum “S” point is going to match the latitude the satellite was launched from. Again, advantage to the French. Adjusting or changing the fundamental orbit shape requires a lot of fuel – It can be done, but nobody wants to.
Launching directly south from California SE-NW angled coastline allows the US to get polar orbits from CA by launching south over the Pacific. You lose all of the extra rotational speed of the earth, but there are penalties for anything – even getting out of bed in the morning. Can’t do southern launches like that from Florida without raining rocket debris on Miami, Cuba, or the islands. Or the Everglades – which to this administration would be far worse.
The old system of misinforming grade school students with CO2 religious stories worked just fine.
Ferdinand Engelbeen:
Your post at July 3, 2014 at 12:59 am includes this
It is strange that you put so much faith in your flawed CO2 mass balance model when you can see the failings of climate models devised by others.
Richard
Will NASA’s Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 satellite be “counting” carbon or carbon dioxide?
This statement, “The spacecraft carries one instrument and its sole focus is detecting carbon dioxide and watching from space as the Earth “breathes” to see what becomes of the gas.” would seem to imply that the satellite should be named “Orbiting Carbon Dioxide Observatory-2”.
It is becoming all too typical to see the word “Carbon” used when “Carbon Dioxide” is what is meant. One, many people would reasonably consider a pollutant under certain circumstances, while the other – take a deep breath, exhale – most reasonable people do not.
It said that while many experts have blamed climate change for the problem, a drop in the populations of parrotfish and sea urchins is largely responsible
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dive PI. In areas where fishing is banned, the corals are spectacular.
Coral thrives in the Red Sea, in the hottest ocean temperatures on the planet. In contrast there are almost no coral reefs outside the tropics.
If coral reefs preferred colder water, they would grow in colder waters. Somehow science is baffled by this.
Pre-“calibrated” to confirm warmunist claims.
Don K:
At July 3, 2014 at 2:46 am you ask
You have that right.
The IPCC reports provide simplified descriptions of the carbon cycle. In of our 2005 papers
(ref. Rorsch A, Courtney RS & Thoenes D, ‘The Interaction of Climate Change and the Carbon Dioxide Cycle’ E&E v16no2 (2005) )
we considered the most important processes in the carbon cycle to be:
Mechanisms of the carbon cycle
Short-term processes
1. Consumption of CO2 by photosynthesis that takes place in green plants on land. CO2 from the air and water from the soil are coupled to form carbohydrates. Oxygen is liberated. This process takes place mostly in spring and summer. A rough distinction can be made:
1a. The formation of leaves that are short lived (less than a year).
1b. The formation of tree branches and trunks, that are long lived (decades).
2. Production of CO2 by the metabolism of animals, and by the decomposition of vegetable matter by micro-organisms including those in the intestines of animals, whereby oxygen is consumed and water and CO2 (and some carbon monoxide and methane that will eventually be oxidised to CO2) are liberated. Again distinctions can be made:
2a. The decomposition of leaves, that takes place in autumn and continues well into the next winter, spring and summer.
2b. The decomposition of branches, trunks, etc. that typically has a delay of some decades after their formation.
2c. The metabolism of animals that goes on throughout the year.
3. Consumption of CO2 by absorption in cold ocean waters. Part of this is consumed by marine vegetation through photosynthesis.
4. Production of CO2 by desorption from warm ocean waters. Part of this may be the result of decomposition of organic debris.
5. Circulation of ocean waters from warm to cold zones, and vice versa, thus promoting processes 3 and 4.
Longer-term process
6. Formation of peat from dead leaves and branches (eventually leading to lignite and coal).
7. Erosion of silicate rocks, whereby carbonates are formed and silica is liberated.
8. Precipitation of calcium carbonate in the ocean, that sinks to the bottom, together with formation of corals and shells.
Natural processes that add CO2 to the system:
9. Production of CO2 from volcanoes (by eruption and gas leakage).
10. Natural forest fires, coal seam fires and peat fires.
Anthropogenic processes that add CO2 to the system:
11. Production of CO2 by burning of vegetation (“biomass”).
12. Production of CO2 by burning of fossil fuels (and by lime kilns).
Several of these processes are rate dependant and several of them interact.
At higher air temperatures, the rates of processes 1, 2, 4 and 5 will increase and the rate of process 3 will decrease. Process 1 is strongly dependent on temperature, so its rate will vary strongly (maybe by a factor of 10) throughout the changing seasons.
The rates of processes 1, 3 and 4 are dependent on the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere. The rates of processes 1 and 3 will increase with higher CO2 concentration, but the rate of process 4 will decrease.
The rate of process 1 has a complicated dependence on the atmospheric CO2 concentration. At higher concentrations at first there will be an increase that will probably be less than linear (with an “order” <1). But after some time, when more vegetation (more biomass) has been formed, the capacity for photosynthesis will have increased, resulting in a progressive increase of the consumption rate.
Processes 1 to 5 are obviously coupled by mass balances. Our paper assessed the steady-state situation to be an oversimplification because there are two factors that will never be “steady”:
I. The removal of CO2 from the system, or its addition to the system.
II. External factors that are not constant and may influence the process rates, such as varying solar activity.
Modeling this system is a difficult because so little is known concerning the rate equations. However, some things can be stated from the empirical data.
At present the yearly increase of the anthropogenic emissions is approximately 0.1 GtC/year. The natural fluctuation of the excess consumption (i.e. consumption processes 1 and 3 minus production processes 2 and 4) is at least 6 ppmv (which corresponds to 12 GtC) in 4 months. This is more than 100 times the yearly increase of human production, which strongly suggests that the dynamics of the natural processes here listed 1-5 can cope easily with the human production of CO2. A serious disruption of the system may be expected when the rate of increase of the anthropogenic emissions becomes larger than the natural variations of CO2. But the above data indicates this is not possible.
The accumulation rate of CO2 in the atmosphere (1.5 ppmv/year which corresponds to 3 GtC/year) is equal to almost half the human emission (6.5 GtC/year). However, this does not mean that half the human emission accumulates in the atmosphere, as is often stated. There are several other and much larger CO2 flows in and out of the atmosphere. The total CO2 flow into the atmosphere is at least 156.5 GtC/year with 150 GtC/year of this being from natural origin and 6.5 GtC/year from human origin. So, on the average, 3/156.5 = 2% of all emissions accumulate.
The above qualitative considerations suggest the carbon cycle cannot be very sensitive to relatively small disturbances such as the present anthropogenic emissions of CO2. However, the system could be quite sensitive to temperature. So, our paper considered how the carbon cycle would be disturbed if – for some reason – the temperature of the atmosphere were to rise, as it almost certainly did between 1880 and 1940 (there was an estimated average rise of 0.5 °C in average surface temperature).
Therefore we used attribution studies to determine what could be excluded as a possible cause of the recent rise to atmospheric CO2 concentration. These studies showed there is no definitive evidence for a mostly anthropogenic or a mostly natural cause.
Richard
Not stupid, they just forgot a single word: “The only safe way to accomplish a polar orbit from U.S. soil…” There, now not stupid.
Don K says:
July 3, 2014 at 2:46 am
What this satellite is intended to do is tell us exactly where the CO2 originates and exactly where it is being removed from the atmosphere, And the quantities being sourced/sunk. Do I have that right or am I totally confused?
That indeed is the task of this satellite: to measure where and how much CO2 is emitted and absorbed. If it will be accurate enough remains to be seen. If you look at the human emissions, that is about 9 GtC/year or 4.5 ppmv/year. That is measurable over the year by year increase, but not even over a week, as the human induced change over a week is less than 0.1 ppmv, the detection limit of the measurements at Mauna Loa. AIRS had an accuracy of not better than 5 ppmv, I hope this one will be much better.
Thus this satellite can’t tell you where the human emissions originate (except if concentrated in certain areas), but it may tell you where the bulk of the natural carbon cycle originates and sinks.
Greg Goodman says:
“Correction , they are not even measuring gas concentration, they making spectrograph measurements and inferring gas concentration.”
Are they using some kind of an FTIR? [Fourier transformation infrared gas analyser]
The precision is quite good if the measurement interval is not short. They can detect dozens of gases and molecule types with a single IR cell down to parts per billion. I presume it is connected to a big telescope. You can buy your own if you sell your Tesla.
“Mac the Knife says:
July 3, 2014 at 1:54 am
Steven Mosher says:
July 2, 2014 at 11:11 pm
check here if youre (sic) paranoid about data hiding.. its a conspiracy
Steve,
I was doing some research into hard drive failures recently. Know what the # 1 cause of hard drive failures is in the US Internal Revenue Service over the last 5 years?”
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On the evidence the IRS loss of data looks mighty suspicious. But as skeptics we want to be ruled by the data, not our suspicions, not our theories of how leftists operate. But I do love seeing skeptics jump to conclusions before all the data is in. Kinda what leftist did in the zimmerman case
But I suppose you think like this. The IRS conspired to lose the data, the IRS is part of the government, therefore all parts of the government will conspire to lose data. JPL is paid by the government, so thats close enough for me. Therefore JPL will conspire to lose data. It all fits.
its a hoax its a conspiracy.
Now you go into this thing believing the JPL will conspire to hide data.
Let’s suppose there is a delay. you will argue they are hiding.. it fits the pattern.
Let’s suppose the link goes down.. you will say it fits the pattern
Lets suppose we get the data.. you will argue its fudged..
now nothing will convince you that the data is real.
I once talked to a guy who didnt like jews. he thought we ruled the world. He was convinced that
the holocaust never happened or wasnt as bad as it was. Once he decided this, no evidence could change his mind because he was so invested in being right.
Mac and Mosher
This IRS hard drive thing is off-topic, please stop
They admit that only ten percent of the data will be reliable. It seems to me that the potential for fraudulent manipulation of the other 90% to prove their AGW conclusions is enormous. I think we’re in for another round of “it’s even worse than we thought” and the CO2 satellite proves it.