A mishap shortly after launch led to the loss of the Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO), a NASA environmental monitoring satellite, on 24 February. The satellite crashed into the ocean off Antarctica.rn"It's a major setback," says Paul Palmer, a climate scientist at the University of Edinburgh, UK, who is part of the OCO science team. It will be particularly devastating for the tight-knit group of scientists and engineers who have devoted much of the past decade to the project. "These guys have sweated OCO for seven or eight years," he says.rnOCO, which cost US$273 million, was designed to measure carbon dioxide levels at various depths in the atmosphere with high enough precision to allow the sources and sinks of the gas to be assessed. It would have provided researchers with a comparativelyrnhigh-resolution global picture of how carbon dioxide is absorbed by oceans, forests and other components of the Earth system.
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