A new satellite to track the chief culprit in global warming crashed into the ocean near Antarctica after launch on Tuesday, dealing a major setback to NASA’s already weak network for monitoring Earth and its environment from above.
The US$280 million mission was designed to answer one of the biggest question marks of global warming: What happens to the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide spewed by the burning of coal, oil and natural gas? How much of it is sucked up and stored by plants, soil and oceans and how much is left to trap heat on Earth to worsen global warming?
“It’s definitely a setback. We were already well behind,” said Neal Lane, science adviser during former US president Bill Clinton’s administration. “The program was weak, and now it’s really weak.”
PHOTO: AP
For about a decade, scientists have complained of a decline in the study of Earth from space. NASA spent more money looking at other planets than it did at Earth in 2007. That same year, the National Academy of Sciences warned that NASA’s study of Earth “is at great risk” with fewer missions than before and aging satellites.
“We have a very weakened Earth-observing system just at a time where we need every bit of data that we could possibly get,” said Elisabeth Holland, a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado.
She said NASA has fallen behind Europe in environmental satellites. Japan successfully launched a carbon dioxide tracking satellite just last month.
The NASA satellite, called the Orbiting Carbon Observatory, was meant to explain Earth’s capture of carbon dioxide, which now appears to be slowing and could accelerate global warming, said Holland, who helped write the 2006 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report.
Minutes after launch on Tuesday in California, the satellite fell back to Earth near Antarctica not far from where environment ministers and scientists met on Monday to talk about climate change.
NASA officials said a protective cover on the satellite did not release and fall away and the extra weight meant the satellite could not reach orbit.
“This was going to be one of the few bright spots in the Earth-observing system for the last five years,” Holland said.
The future was starting to look better for the scientists, who had felt ignored. Last year, NASA talked about being “greener” and gave initial approval to six new Earth-observing missions. This month, the administration of US President Barack Obama put US$400 million in the stimulus program for NASA science and NASA’s science chief Ed Weiler said “it was all going to Earth sciences.”
“It’s very unfortunate that it happened just at this time when we trying to get Earth observations back on track,” said Ruth DeFries, a Columbia University professor who was part of the National Academy study team.
Until Japan’s launch, scientists have depended on land-based stations to monitor carbon dioxide at low altitudes. The Japanese probe uses a different technique to measure carbon dioxide and does so from a different orbit compared to NASA’s satellite.
Tuesday’s failure put on hold the launch of another NASA satellite, Glory, which will look at solar radiation and airborne particles that reflect and trap sunlight. That satellite will launch on the same kind of rocket, the Taurus XL.
NASA needs to figure out what went wrong before Glory is launched, Weiler said.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
JOINT EFFORTS: The three countries have been strengthening an alliance and pressing efforts to bolster deterrence against Beijing’s assertiveness in the South China Sea The US, Japan and the Philippines on Friday staged joint naval drills to boost crisis readiness off a disputed South China Sea shoal as a Chinese military ship kept watch from a distance. The Chinese frigate attempted to get closer to the waters, where the warships and aircraft from the three allied countries were undertaking maneuvers off the Scarborough Shoal — also known as Huangyan Island (黃岩島) and claimed by Taiwan and China — in an unsettling moment but it was warned by a Philippine frigate by radio and kept away. “There was a time when they attempted to maneuver
RSS