On the foggy (click here) morning of July 2, 2014, a Delta II rocket carrying NASA’s Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 (OCO-2) roared off the launch pad at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. The landmark satellite will survey carbon dioxide in Earth’s atmosphere and is expected to provide insight into how the planet is responding to the increasing concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
While sensors on the ground have monitored carbon dioxide for decades, key questions about how carbon cycles between Earth’s atmosphere, ocean, and land surfaces persist. For instance, it isn’t well understood how a significant portion of carbon dioxide emissions get recycled to other parts of the planet rather than remaining in the atmosphere.
“Half of the carbon dioxide we’re dumping into the atmosphere every year is disappearing somewhere,” explained OCO-2 project scientist David Crisp during a press conference prior to the launch. “We know from measurements that about a quarter of it is dissolving into the ocean, and we assume that the other quarter is going into the land biosphere somewhere—into forests, into trees, into grasslands—but we don't know where. It is absolutely critical that we learn what processes are absorbing carbon dioxide because we need to understand how much longer they might continue to do us that great favor.”...
