Technology Review: NASA's Carbon Observatory Set for Blastoff

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NASA's Carbon Observatory Set for Blastoff

A satellite will launch tomorrow to help scientists account for missing carbon-dioxide emissions.

Early Tuesday morning, a Taurus XL rocket will take off from Vandenberg Air Force Base, in California, bearing NASA's Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO) satellite. It will be the space agency's first satellite dedicated to measuring CO in the atmosphere, and it could fill huge gaps in researchers' understanding of climate change.

On average, about half of the 30 billion tons of CO emitted by the burning of fossil fuels each year doesn't stay in the atmosphere, and scientists aren't entirely sure where this CO ends up. They have a general idea that it's taken up by the ocean and by plants. But they don't know exactly where this happens on the planet or what mechanisms are involved. As a result, they can't predict how much CO will be absorbed in the future. According to some theories, CO absorption will increase, slowing global warming. According to others, carbon "sinks" such as the ocean may soon stop absorbing CO , and could actually start releasing it, potentially accelerating global warming.

"People are asking us to predict how much the climate will change over the next 50 years," says David Crisp , who is the principal investigator for the OCO project at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), in Pasadena, CA. "How can I tell you how much CO -induced climate change there's going to be if I don't know how much CO there's going to be in the atmosphere?" he says. Even if it were possible to predict how much CO humans will put into the atmosphere, "that's still only half the puzzle," he says. "I still need to know how much is going to be absorbed by the earth."

Scientists haven't been able ...

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