In February 2009, NASA launched the Orbiting Carbon Observatory, a research spacecraft that crashed into the ocean shortly after launch. The project, managed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, was designed to map the distribution of carbon dioxide (CO₂) in the Earth’s atmosphere. In February 2013, NASA has announced, it will launch its Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 (OCO-2) spacecraft.

OCO-2 will go up aboard a Taurus XL 3110 rocket from Vandenberg Air Force Base.

The U.S. Department of Energy currently monitors CO₂ emissions from a network of ground-based sites, but this network does not have enough stations to provide the spatial distribution needed to understand how the oceans, atmosphere, and biosphere exchange CO₂. From its space-based platform, OCO-2 can collect high-resolution measurements that, when combined with the ground-based data, will show the distribution of CO₂ over the entire globe.

In 2009, OCO-1’s launch rocket failed to shed the shroud that protects the spacecraft from the Earth’s atmosphere, and the added weight made it impossible for OCO-1 to reach orbit. In December of that year, the Congressional Conference committee directed NASA to allocate funds in FY10 for the initial costs of a replacement mission.

This week, NASA selected Orbital Sciences Corporation of Dulles, VA, to provide OCO-2’s launch services at a cost of $70 million. The cost includes the Taurus rocket, data and telemetry support, launch vehicle tracking, and other payload processing.

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