From New York City, at the National Meeting of the American Chemical Society
NASA is gearing up to make the first measurements of atmospheric carbon dioxide from space. Researchers at the agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., are developing a spacecraft dubbed the Orbiting Carbon Observatory that will collect information on the greenhouse gas for 2 years.
This wealth of new data will not only generate the most detailed map ever of atmospheric carbon dioxide, but it will also enable researchers to dramatically improve their predictions of future climate changes. Scheduled to launch in the summer of 2007, the observatory will cover Earth every 16 days and collect 25 million CO2 measurements during each of these periods, says Charles Miller, the project’s deputy principal investigator.