{"id":13217,"date":"2019-04-25T19:05:15","date_gmt":"2019-04-25T11:05:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp-productionenv-bjg9h2g2bgg5b8aa.southeastasia-01.azurewebsites.net\/news\/carbon-monitoring-instrument-poised-for-launch-to-international-space-station\/"},"modified":"2019-04-25T19:05:15","modified_gmt":"2019-04-25T11:05:15","slug":"carbon-monitoring-instrument-poised-for-launch-to-international-space-station","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/news\/carbon-monitoring-instrument-poised-for-launch-to-international-space-station\/","title":{"rendered":"Carbon-monitoring instrument poised for launch to International Space Station"},"content":{"rendered":"
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An astronaut on the International Space Station captured this image of the Florida peninsula April 20. Credit: NASA<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

A $110 million NASA science instrument twice targeted for cancellation by the Trump administration is set for launch Tuesday inside the trunk of a SpaceX Dragon cargo capsule for delivery to the International Space Station, where it will spend three years charting changing carbon dioxide concentrations in Earth\u2019s atmosphere.<\/p>\n

Once mounted outside the space station\u2019s Kibo lab module, the instrument package will scan the planet between 52 degrees north and 52 degrees south latitude with the sensitivity to measure carbon dioxide levels to a precision better than one part per million, or within about 0.3 to 0.5 percent of the total carbon dioxide present in the atmosphere.<\/p>\n

The Orbiting Carbon Observatory-3, or OCO-3, instrument is a follow-up to NASA\u2019s OCO-2 satellite launched in 2014. OCO-2 was designed for a two-year mission, but continues collecting carbon dioxide data in its fifth year of operations.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe key motivation for the OCO-3 experiment is to continue this record of carbon dioxide,\u201d said Annmarie Eldering, OCO-3 project scientist at NASA\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. \u201cOCO-2 was built to last two years, we\u2019ve had it up there for four years, but there\u2019s always a risk it\u2019s not going to survive.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019d like to have measurements that cover a long duration, and OCO-3 is going to help add to that record,\u201d Eldering said.<\/p>\n

OCO-3\u2019s high-resolution spectrometers are fitted to an Earth-pointing telescope with the ability to scan side-to-side, allowing the instrument to measure carbon dioxide in 50-mile by 50-mile (80-kilometer) squares in as little as two minutes. Within that zone, OCO-3 can collect a snapshot of carbon dioxide levels over 1-mile-wide (1.6-kilometer) footprints.<\/p>\n

The instrument will also observe faint light emitted by plants during photosynthesis, the process by which they convert light into energy, breathing in carbon dioxide and putting out oxygen. The light signal is called solar-induced fluorescence.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen plants are doing photosynthesis, they emit a little bit of light, and we can sense that light in our measurements,\u201d Eldering said. \u201cSo we have a measure of plant photosynthesis activity in combination with the carbon dioxide.\u201d<\/p>\n

Teams at JPL built OCO-3 around a spare instrument originally manufactured for OCO-2, but the new mission is more than a carbon copy, according to NASA scientists.<\/p>\n

OCO-2 flies in a polar sun-synchronous orbit providing nearly global coverage, whereas the space station\u2019s orbit does not pass over the poles. OCO-2\u2019s orbit is timed to allow the spacecraft to fly over the same region of the planet in the early afternoon \u2014 roughly 1:30 p.m. local time \u2014 every day.<\/p>\n

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An illustration of the OCO-3 instrument\u2019s scanning path under the space station\u2019s orbit. Credit: NASA\/JPL-Caltech<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The space station\u2019s orbit is not synchronized with the sun, allowing observations over time to cover the entire day, from sunrise to sunset.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat\u2019s really important because plants respond to sun, so we need to see them behaving across the day,\u201d Eldering said.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe can see how they\u2019re acting in the morning, at midday, what happens when it\u2019s really hot in the afternoon?\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

And OCO-2 flies at an altitude of around 438 miles (705 kilometers), nearly 200 miles (300 kilometers) above the space station\u2019s orbit.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt is the same spectrometer (as OCO-2),\u201d Eldering told reporters Monday. \u201cThe telescope is a little different because the orbit altitude is a little different.\u201d<\/p>\n

The OCO-3 mission cost around $110 million, including expenses to modify the already-built sensors for use on the space station, according to Eldering. NASA spent $467 million on the instrument, spacecraft and launch vehicle for the OCO-2 mission. Most of those expenses are not required for a hosted payload flying on the space station.<\/p>\n

NASA\u2019s efforts to establish a series of carbon dioxide-monitoring satellites have faced setbacks.<\/p>\n

The first Orbiting Carbon Observatory, or OCO-1, was lost in a launch failure on a Taurus XL rocket in 2009. The Obama administration approved the OCO-2 replacement mission, which launched in July 2014 on a Delta 2 booster, and the follow-on OCO-3 mission using spare hardware.<\/p>\n

Since the beginning of the Trump administration, the White House twice proposed eliminating OCO-3 from NASA\u2019s budget, along with other Earth science missions, including the Earth-facing instruments on the Deep Space Climate Observatory spacecraft stationed a million miles (1.5 million kilometers) from Earth.<\/p>\n

The Trump administration has also proposed cancelling the Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud, ocean Ecosystem, or PACE, satellite mission, and the Climate Absolute Radiance and Refractivity Observatory Pathfinder, or CLARREO Pathfinder mission, on three occasions. The White House\u2019s fiscal year 2020 budget proposal, released earlier this year, did away with the request to terminate funding for the OCO-3 and DSCOVR missions.<\/p>\n

Congress continued to fund OCO-3 and the other Earth science missions in fiscal year 2018 and 2019 budget bills signed by President Trump, keeping the projects alive.<\/p>\n

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NASA\u2019s Orbiting Carbon Observatory-3 (OCO-3) and the U.S. military\u2019s Space Test Program-Houston 6 (STP-H6) payloads are in view installed in the trunk of SpaceX\u2019s Dragon spacecraft inside the SpaceX facility at NASA\u2019s Kennedy Space Center in Florida on March 23, 2019. Credit: NASA<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cSince about the start of the industrial revolution, we\u2019ve seen CO2 levels in the atmosphere increase by about 30 percent,\u201d said Ralph Basilio, NASA\u2019s OCO-3 project manager at JPL. \u201cHuman activity is causing a tipping of the scales, this very fine delicate balance that we have in what we call the carbon cycle.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cOCO-3 is going to specifically produce a dataset of carbon dioxide measurements,\u201d Basilio said. \u201cWe\u2019d like to be able to keep an eye on this atmospheric CO2. Where did it come from? Where is it going? And how is it related to other global processes?\u201d<\/p>\n

Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, and scientists say rising levels of CO2 in the atmosphere caused by the burning of fossil fuels is driving temperatures warmer. Like its predecessor OCO-2, the OCO-3 instrument will seek to identify natural and human-made sources and sinks of carbon dioxide, places where the gas is emitted into the atmosphere and ingested into plants and oceans.<\/p>\n

Eldering said plants and oceans take out about half of the carbon dioxide produced by human activity, dampening the impact of rising CO2 emissions. But there\u2019s some variability year-to-year.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe think it\u2019s tied to things like El Ni\u00f1o, drought, precipitation and temperature, but we really need to understand more if we want to predict accurately what will happen in the future,\u201d Eldering said. \u201cWe\u2019ve got to understand these processes.\u201d<\/p>\n

Using the new targeted pointing capability, which is not available on the OCO-2 satellite, the OCO-3 instrument will take snapshots of carbon dioxide concentrations over the oceans, forested regions, volcanoes, cities and industrial zones, such as power plants.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis capability of OCO-3 to map out some of those areas and start to see some change over time, that really is how we\u2019re going to advance our understanding and our modeling for the future of understanding our climate,\u201d Eldering said.<\/p>\n

OCO-3\u2019s ability to measure carbon dioxide at all times of the day will also help scientists collect more observations without interference from clouds, which are more prevalent in the afternoon, when OCO-2 flies overhead.<\/p>\n

\u201cFor example, the vast carbon stores of the rapidly changing Amazon rainforest are a critical part of Earth\u2019s carbon cycle, but when OCO-2 flies over the forest at about 1:30 p.m., afternoon clouds have usually built up, hiding the region from the instrument\u2019s view,\u201d NASA said in a press release. \u201cOCO-3 will pass the Amazon at all times of day, capturing far more cloud-free data.<\/p>\n