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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.
is a hoax, and the rocket knows it was just wasting time and money. It threw the launch.
The telemetry from the satellite is reading zero across the board. That must mean there's no carbon dioxide in the atmosphere anymore. Now we don't have to worry about global warming - fantastic!
Good work, NASA. I knew we could get this climate change thing cleared up once we had better data.
The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them. - Mark Twain
Was the decision to use the Taurus to keep launch costs down? Launching from Vandenberg, I'm assuming they were aiming for a steep inclination. Just wondering if anyone knows why they didn't go with a Delta II....
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.
So this means that in the battle against climate change, the biggest shot NASA has taken thus far is a rocket attack on Antarctica.
Oh honey look... How cute... an angry slashdotter!
Satellites are usually built in pairs just in case one of them fails during launch
Not usually...at least none of the NASA or AFRL projects I'm familiar with has a full-build spare. It's not entirely uncommon to have a second of some of the instruments, and it's pretty common to have enough spare parts to build another copy of an instrument. (Much easier to buy a couple of spares up front rather than wait around if someone screws something up.) Then testing and integration can go much more quickly and cheaply, having done it once before. It still can take awhile, though.
(Incidentally, the title and summary for this article suck...the OCO didn't fail, it was lost in a launch failure, and it didn't "fail its mission," it didn't get a chance to start. That's like saying your car broke down because someone ran a red light and T-boned it. No offense intended to the launch team.)
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.
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the builders were saying how much easier it would be to build a second one, now that all the design work was done and they have experience putting it together
First rule in government spending: why build one when you can have two at twice the price? -S.R. Hadden
An ICBM is what happens when you take a shit outside in Antarctica.
If you don't want to repeat the past, stop living in it.
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.
I can see the fnords!