NASA’s New Satellite To Solve The Mystery Of Climate Change
The entire human activity is responsible for nearly 30 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide wafting into the atmosphere yearly, sciam.com reports. It is a well known fact that 15 billion metric tons remains in the atmosphere for more than one hundred years. Some of the rest of 15 billion metric tons “ends up in the ocean-acidifying saltwater and making life tough for corals and another chunk appears to be helping tropical trees grow thicker.” And let’s not ignore the fact that the burning fossil fuels used by humans increased the total amount of CO2 at about 386 ppm in the atmosphere and is rising rapidly. Where the rest of humanity’s CO2 is disappearing to, nobody seems to know.
And that’s exactly what the new satellite, the Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO) is supposed to find out. “With the launch of OCO, scientists will be able to study CO2 concentration from the surface of the Earth to the top of the atmosphere,” says Eric Ianson, OCO science program executive at NASA. “Its high-resolution measurements will provide a more complete picture of human and natural sources of CO2 at the local and regional scale.”
“On average, there are about four billion metric tons more of carbon in the atmosphere each year,” says Anna Michalak, an OCO team scientist at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. “This increase in carbon is contributing to climate change.”
At present, CO2 is mostly monitored from Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii that has been measuring atmospheric CO2 levels since 1958. In fact, there around 100 ground stations and high-flying aircrafts that monitor and measure the atmospheric CO2 levels. However, it will not match the information provided by just one 16-day orbit of OCO. To make the analysis, the satellite will orbit at an altitude of 438 miles (705 kilometers) traveling some 4.3 miles (seven kilometers) per second. It will take three measurements per second from its polar orbit, which allows it to circle Earth from pole to pole as the planet rotates beneath it, thereby allowing coverage of the whole globe.
Sciam.com reports that the $278-million program will employ three spectrometers to analyze light reflected off Earth. Paired with precise data about where the satellite is, OCO will be able to determine how many CO2 molecules are in that slice of the atmosphere based on how much infrared light has been absorbed.
“No other molecules have dynamics that are the same as these motions [of CO2]. They act as molecular fingerprints,” says Charles Miller, OCO deputy principal investigator at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California. “Using very accurate measurements of the changes in the amount of light that are being absorbed by CO2, we can make a very precise measurements of the number of CO2 molecules in the atmosphere.”
“We’ll have much more information on where the CO2 is, and from that we can infer where the sources are and where the sinks are,” says David Crisp, OCO principal investigator at JPL. By identifying the parts of the planet absorbing CO2, scientists hope to be able to predict how they might behave in the future. “We need to understand why plants and oceans are taking up as much carbon as they are and how this will change in future,” Michalak adds. “It is important to be able to predict how things will change in the future.”
The Taurus XL rocket carried the nearly half-ton satellite much of the way to its orbit, at 4:51 A.M. Eastern time on February 24.
Sources: nasa.gov; sciam.com.