The National Aeronautics and Space Administration is funding the world's first satellite designed to track climate change with an estimated amount of $468 million. The administration plans to launch it in July 2014.
The "Orbiting Carbon Observatory," or OCO-2 satellite, is being developed at a manufacturing facility in Gilbert, Ariz. and is being tested by the engineers of a spacecraft manufacturer based in Dulles, Va. Orbital Sciences. The Gilbert facility has about 300 employees with 40 dedicated on the OCO-2 project.
Once deployed, the satellite will provide a more comprehensive picture of the Earth's current condition pertaining to climate change taking about 200,000 samples on a daily basis. It will monitor the carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere as well as the visible impacts of global warming in the forests and oceans.
"It's obvious that human emissions, particularly within the developing world, have been increasing at a staggering rate," said Michael Gunson, project scientist for NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California to USA Today.
"It's going to affect all of us, for example, if we find that the response of the great rain forests in the Amazon, the Congo and Indonesia is very sensitive to climate change," Gunson said.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change had predicted up to 10 degrees rise in the temperature in the next century. Such elevated temperature can cause a major shift in the climate across the world. Snows in the mountain will melt, drought will prevail, and some areas may experience extreme rainfalls.
Aside from monitoring the carbon dioxide in the air, the OCO-2 will also track the emissions from automobiles and factories and observe how it is being absorbed by the forests and the oceans. They hope to find out how humans contribute to global warming so that they can recommend a way to stop it.
This new satellite project is part of the administration's response to President Obama's call to focus more on climate change and Earth science. NASA is complying with the order despite its limited resources.
"We probably can't survive in the mode we're operating right now," NASA administrator Charles Bolden said to USA Today. "We have got to have the money to do the things the nation is demanding of us."
