NASA carbon - monitoring orbiter readies for launch

摘要

If everything goes to plan, on 1 July NASA will attempt to launch its first carbon-monitoring satellite - for the second time. The US$465-million Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 (OCO-2) is designed to collect precise, high-resolution measurements of the carbon dioxide in Earth's atmosphere. It is a near-copy of a NASA probe that crashed in 2009 before it reached orbit, devastating the scientists who had hoped to use its data to map sources and sinks of the greenhouse gas - both man-made and natural - in unprecedented detail.