NASA global warming satellite crashes after launch
By Alicia Chang, Ap Science Writer, Yahoo News [here]
LOS ANGELES – A NASA mission to monitor global warming from space ended Tuesday when a satellite plunged into the ocean near Antarctica minutes after launch. An equipment malfunction was apparently to blame, officials said.
The loss of the $280 million mission came a month after Japan launched the world’s first spacecraft to track global warming emissions. The failure dealt a blow to NASA, which had hoped to send up its own satellite to measure carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas behind human-caused global warming.
The crash came just after liftoff from the Vandenberg Air Force Base on California’s central coast. A Taurus XL rocket carrying the Orbiting Carbon Observatory blasted off as scheduled shortly before 2 a.m.
Three minutes into the flight, the nose cone protecting the satellite failed to come off as designed, NASA officials said. The extra weight from the cover caused the rocket to dive back to Earth, splashing into the ocean near Antarctica, where a group of environment ministers from more than a dozen countries met Monday to get the latest science on global warming. [Unfortunately the rocket missed them.]
“Certainly for the science community it’s a huge disappointment,” said John Brunschwyler, Taurus project manager for Virginia-based Orbital Sciences Corp., which built the rocket and satellite. “It’s taken so long to get here.”
The 986-pound satellite was supposed to be placed into a polar orbit some 400 miles high. The project was nine years in the making, and the mission was supposed to last two years.
The observatory was NASA’s first satellite dedicated to monitoring carbon dioxide on a global scale. Measurements collected by the satellite were expected to improve climate models and help researchers determine where the greenhouse gas originates and how much is being absorbed by forests and oceans.
“Wow! Bad news this morning,” said Scott Denning, an atmospheric science professor at Colorado State University in Fort Collins, Colo., and a member of the team that planned to analyze data from the satellite. “We put years into getting ready for this.”
Carbon dioxide is the leading greenhouse gas and its buildup helps trap heat from the sun, causing potentially dangerous warming of the planet. [Excuse me, but that is utter BS, Alicia.]
Scientists now depend on 282 land-based stations — and scattered instrumented aircraft flights — to monitor carbon dioxide at low altitudes. … [more]
Note: For some interesting commentary see Watts Up With That [here]