The US Congress is ratcheting up demands for NASA to launch Earth-monitoring satellites that could help to verify the emissions targets currently being debated in Copenhagen.rnIn a US$447-billion spending bill approved on 13 December (see table), lawmakers told NASA to spend $50 million in fiscal year 2010 on a replacement for the Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO), which crashed into the ocean near Antarctica in February after a rocket failure. "It looks like there is a future here," says David Crisp, the missions principal investigator at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. But by adding the OCO to NASAs already long list of Earth-science missions-and with no promise of future funding-some Earth scientists worry that Congress is asking the agency to do too much. Berrien Moore, director of Climate Central, a think tank in Princeton, New Jersey, says that he was both "pleased and worried" by the OCO funding because of the additional burden on the mission programme.
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