NASA's Orbiting Carbon Observatory Mission Fails

jw3 writes "The NASA Orbiting Carbon Observatory scheduled for launch today has failed its mission: the payload fairing failed to separate and the launch managers declared a contingency. George Diller, NASA launch commentator, said, 'It either did not separate or did not separate in the way that it should, but at any rate we're still trying to evaluate exactly what the status of the spacecraft is at this point.'" Update: 02/24 14:17 GMT by T : Reader fadethepolice points out a Reuters report which says that the craft crashed into the ocean just short of Antarctica.

Comments

NASA Satellite lands in ocean

[langelgjm]

According to the NYT, that's pretty much what happened: NASA Satellite Lands in Ocean

Re:What's the contingency for these missions?

[confused one]

Contingency? We don't have no contingency. Seriously though: looks like the only options are to either hope someone else's similar but not quite equivalent satellite generates data they can use; or, spend the money to build and launch a replacement. By the way, they spent 7 years building, testing and waiting for launch, not 2.

well we're f*****d

[wisebabo]

This probe would have provided millions of carbon dioxide measurements a day* for the entire atmospheric column (rather than the hundreds of measurements, usually only at ground level that we currently get from our fixed sensors). Considering the importance these measurements would be in helping us predict climate change, I think we (the human race) has just suffered a serious setback.

[There was a scene in the movie "Silent Running" where the command is given to jettison and detonate the last remaining biospheres. The commander says "may god have mercy on us". I'm beginning to feel that way now.]

*it was going to take readings at 56,000 locations a day but at each location would record carbon dioxide concentrations for the entire air column.

Re:well we're f*****d

[Chris Burke]

CO2 is a greenhouse gas. But compared to water vapor, you know, clouds. It's barely anything.

Yeah, but while the levels of CO2 can and have increased dramatically, the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere is limited to the saturation point and is self-regulating. You know, rain.

Re:well we're f*****d

[Ambitwistor]

OCO and GOSAT were complementary. OCO would have produced really high-res "slices" every 16 days, whereas GOSAT gives wider continuous regions of coverage, with a greater repeat frequency (3 days), but at lower spatial resolution. Both would have measured the same quantity, total column CO2.

I'm not sure what OCO's capabilities regarding ocean sinks were, but I'm somewhat skeptical that it could have detected a permafrost tipping point before it is too late to do anything about it, and probably it wouldn't have detected anything useful about permafrost during its mission lifetime. Permafrost doesn't start acting up until runaway thawing already commences. To warn against that, what we really need are many more soil measurements of the permafrost active layer in various locations, to see how much soil carbon is at what temperature. You can't detect that from space.

Re:well we're f*****d

[Ambitwistor]

The CO2 causing warming myth is nothing but media and political hype...

Given your statements below, I don't think your knowledge of this subject warrants such bold assertions.

Looking at the data, it's clear to see that CO2 increase follows, not leads, an increase in temperature.

In the glacial-interglacial cycle, this is true, but it's also not a surprise; it's a prediction of Milankovitch theory, which existed before any lags or leads were ever measured in the data. It also does not imply that CO2 has no effect on temperature.

If there is causation (thus far only some correlation has been established), then the rise in CO2 is caused by the increase in temperature, not the other way around.

It's both. According to the Milankovitch theory, orbital variations cause shifts in temperature. These temperature shifts cause changes in the carbon cycle, which alters CO2 levels. The altered CO2 levels in turn amplify the original orbital temperature change.

If you leave the CO2 feedback part of that process out, then you can't explain the amplitude of the glacial-interglacial cycles anymore, and it's unclear whether you can even, say, trigger a glaciation without the contribution of CO2 drawdown.

For those that support the CO2 driving the increase, I've yet to see how the climate models explain how the temperature 450 million years ago was colder than it has ever been in the last half billion years, but the CO2 levels were 10 times what we have today.

You could start here, here, or here.

And for those arguing that human activity is driving the increase, why does the rate of increase vary so greatly (particularly looking at the significant decrease in rate during 1991-1993) despite the consistent growth of human CO2 producing activities.

Human emissions don't vary smoothly, nor does the terrestrial carbon sink, which has quite a bit of interannual variability due to climatic effects on, e.g., photosynthesis and heterotrophic respiration. Just as a guess, I'd look first at the collapse of the Soviet Union (assuming there is a significant slowdown during those years, which I haven't checked).

As for human activity driving the observed increase, that's been proven beyond all reasonable doubt. Nobody seriously argues that part of the story anymore; there are about six independent lines of evidence, including historic emissions data, measurements of cumulative ocean carbon and air-sea CO2 fluxes, measurements of terrestrial CO2 fluxes, modeling of said fluxes, shifts in carbon isotope ratios in air and sea, and changes in the CO2/O2 ratio of the atmosphere.

However, it seems that deforestation along with ever expanding cities with concrete and asphalt that absorb and radiate heat make an even better explanation than CO2,

Urban heat islands don't explain the warming. CIties are a small fraction of the Earth's surface and the amount of heat they radiate, even if you take into account subsidiary albedo changes, isn't big enough to account for the warming. Land use change is a good idea in principle (e.g., due to surface albedo changes, alterations in evapotranspiration, etc.), because it's more widespread. But it still falls well short in magnitude: in some locations it has a substantial effect on local temperatures, but simply doesn't explain the global amount or spatial distribution of surface warming.

Re:well we're f*****d

[Ambitwistor]

We don't need OCO to attribute warming to humans. OCO would have improved our understanding of and ability to predict the terrestrial and ocean carbon sinks. This is important to determine how severe global warming may become in the future (since it modifies the amount of CO2 which remains in the atmosphere). Still, to first order the fact remains that regardless of changes in sinks, we still ought to be doing more mitigation than we are.

From the Reuter's Article

[olddotter]

The 986-pound (447-kg) spacecraft was tucked inside a clamshell-like shroud to protect it during the ride into space. But three minutes into the flight, the cover failed to separate as expected, dooming the mission.

"As a direct result of carrying that extra weight we could not make orbit," said John Brunschwyler, the Taurus program manager with manufacturer Orbital Sciences Corp.

The spacecraft, also built by Orbital Sciences, fell back to Earth, splashing down into the southern Pacific Ocean near Antarctica.

Re:According to CNN... (Well, some of it)

[vlm]

I hope that means all the fuel was burned. There's too much of that stuff floating around loose on the planet already.

Over the long term, hydrazine in the environment is mostly harmless.

http://www.gasdetection.com/TECH/hydrazine.html

Vapor-phase hydrazine is degraded in the atmosphere by reaction with photochemically-produced hydroxyl radicals and ozone with estimated half-lives of about 6 and 9 hours, respectively.

All the usual rules of half lives apply here. Somewhere between 1/2 and 3/4 of it's already broken down... Of course if sticking your head inside the fuel tank to take a look would have originally killed you 100 times over, and now it'll only kill you 25 times over, thats little comfort at this moment. None the less, even in colder conditions, it'll be "mostly harmless" in at most a couple weeks or so.

Re:Rebuild?

[carambola5]

It depends on the project, but space projects - even small payloads aboard larger craft - are invariably built in sets. Unfortunately, you usually can't just launch one of the "spares" because they're not actually spares. They are identical units that are tested near (or beyond) the point of failure to predict lifetime of the one flight unit. These are called qualification units, or "Qual Units." Occasionally, you'll also have one or two ground-based units (ground-support equipment, or GSEs) that mimic the project's function but aren't necessarily built with space in mind... for example, expensive weight-saving milling operations have been omitted or cheaper wiring (PVC) may have replaced expensive space-worthy wiring (Teflon).

Re:heh

[TempeTerra]

It's a particular capitalisation style. To shamelessly repeat someone else's response from last time this came up: the BBC style does not capitalise acronyms which are pronounced as words. [radar] would not be capitalised because it's a pronounced word which happens to be an acronym. [Nasa] has the first letter capitalised because it's used as a proper noun. [BBC] is all capitalised because it's an acronym pronounced B.B.C.

Re:What's the contingency for these missions?

[kestasjk]

On second thought, maybe they should tack on a year for design refinements and take a look at that whole separation module thingy.

The team that designed the satellite didn't design the rocket. The rocket was a "Taurus XL", built by a different team to the OCO team (not even by NASA).

I imagine less than 7 years went into the rocket's design, and that it cost much less than $270 million, so I would guess the team behind the satellite would be pretty damn pissed. (I wonder if they insure it etc, and what sort of rates they have to pay to do so)

At any rate it's a real tragedy for everyone; knowing much more about where CO2 comes from and goes would have been a huge leap forward for the study of global warming.

Re:News Flash

[Locke2005]

CO2 is plant food. And so are dead bodies... but that doesn't mean you'd want a pile of them outside your house so high that it blocks out the sun. I don't think there is any shortage of atmospheric C02 that we need to compensate for by adding more -- the plants are doing just fine, at least in the areas that haven't yet been affected by climate change.

Re:Rebuild?

[CraftyJack]

We seem to have different definitions for GSE. If a piece of hardware matches form, fit, and function, but uses different materials, I'd tend to call it a brassboard. For me, GSE usually refers to interface mockups, support electronics, etc. for testing a subsystem.

Re:Global Warming

[conureman]

Actually, IIRC, the last expensive atmospheric satellite failed at launch as well. Gives ME pause...

Re:What's the contingency for these missions?

[bughunter]

I worked on the instrument team for OCO from 1999-2004, and on similar instruments in the past. Yes, it is much easier to build another, but unfortunately, it's not really that much cheaper from a mission point of view, since the launch vehicle and satellite buss are a large fraction of the cost, and most of that is already incremental cost, not NRE. Usually, NASA considers the risk of launch failure and requires contractors to keep records adequate to build another on an incremental basis.

One other cost factor is the ground segment -- the mission operations center and the data analysis facility. As I understood it five years ago, there were plans to build a rather large data center to crunch all the spectrometry data that OCO would have sent down. That didn't get sunk to the bottom of the ocean.

And while I don't think anyone is "pissed," the mission and instrument teams are probably quite dejected. Especially Dr. Crisp, the principal investigator. That was his baby.

There is a good chance that NASA may still "do it over" however, 1) because of the reduced "incremental" cost, and 2) to support Pres. Obama's environmental policy.