NASA's first spacecraft dedicated to measuring carbon dioxide levels in Earth's atmosphere is set to be launched on July 1.
The Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 (OCO-2) mission will work to map out both human and natural carbon dioxide sources as well as their "sinks," a NASA news release reported.
Carbon sinks processes that pull carbon from the atmosphere and store it.
"Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere plays a critical role in our planet's energy balance and is a key factor in understanding how our climate is changing," Michael Freilich, director of NASA's Earth Science Division, said in the news release. "With the OCO-2 mission, NASA will be contributing an important new source of global observations to the scientific challenge of better understanding our Earth and its future."
The spacecraft will sample "global geographic distribution" of carbon and its sinks and look at how they change over time.
The floating observatory will collect hundreds of thousands of measurements everyday using high-resolution spectrometers.
Atmospheric carbon is currently at its highest levels in 800,000 years at 400 parts per million, most likely primarily due to the burning of fossil fuels.
Human activities are believed to contribute 40 billion tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere annually.
Excessive greenhouse gas can be problematic because it traps the Sun's heat within the Earth's atmosphere, which can heat up the planet's surface. Human activities such as the burning of fossil fuel and deforestation could be contributing to the planet's changing climate.
Researchers believed that less than half of the carbon dioxide emitted by human activities remains in the atmosphere, most is absorbed the ocean or other land sinks.
"Knowing what parts of Earth are helping remove carbon from our atmosphere will help us understand whether they will keep doing so in the future," Michael Gunson, OCO-2 project scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), said in the news release. "Understanding the processes controlling carbon dioxide in our atmosphere will help us predict how fast it will build up in the future. Data from this mission will help scientists reduce uncertainties in forecasts of how much carbon dioxide will be in the atmosphere and improve the accuracy of global climate change predictions."
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