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

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: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: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.