Lift-off [image credit: NASA]
Collecting mountains of data on so-called greenhouse gases was not going to be cost-effective, says NASA. ‘Technical concerns’ played a part in the decision.
– – –
All good things must come to an end, and in the case of NASA’s GeoCarb mission, some good things must end before they really begin, says Space.com.
NASA has canceled the GeoCarb mission, which was a collaboration with the University of Oklahoma and Lockheed Martin that intended to put a greenhouse gas–monitoring satellite into geostationary orbit.
GeoCarb would have measured levels of carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide and methane in the atmosphere about 4 million times per day. The mission was selected by NASA in 2016.
“Decisions like this are difficult, but NASA is dedicated to making careful choices with the resources provided by the people of the United States,” Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA’s associate administrator for science, said in a statement. “We look forward to accomplishing our commitment to state-of-the-art climate observation in a more efficient and cost-effective way.”
According to NASA’s statement, the decision to end GeoCarb was due to “technical concerns, cost performance and availability of new alternative data sources.” The most recent anticipated cost of GeoCarb was $600 million, much higher than the mission’s original $170.9 million estimate.
As for those new data sources, they include the new Earth Surface Mineral Dust Source Investigation (EMIT) instrument that arrived at the International Space Station (ISS) in July, as well as the mission extension of the Orbiting Carbon Observatory-3 instrument that began work in 2019 also aboard the ISS.
Full article here.
Tallbloke's Talkshop 
CO2 is the most abundant of the gases they listed, at 400 parts per million (PPM) and one of those is supposed to be man-made, 100 PPM, that is one in ten thousand of Atmosphere. This Satellite was supposed to measure almost nothing, good riddance!
A fun site to play with here that appears to show global CO2 concentrations on given date (change the date in the link, currently set to 2022/12/18, note that darker colours represent higher concentrations.
https://earth.nullschool.net/#2022/12/18/0300Z/chem/surface/level/overlay=co2sc/orthographic=-34.96,44.13,373/loc=15.577,43.082
Relatively large differences between areas, not necessarily what one would expect.
It would be interesting also to know where the data comes from, possibly NASA OCO2?
It is worth investigating the other parts of the site too.
What did really happen to OCO-2 satellite? On the NASA website the “latest images” are from November 2014.
[reply] https://spaceflight101.com/spacecraft/oco-2-orbiting-carbon-observatory-2/
4 million samples/day? What crying need is there to sample the atmosphere’s contents 46 x per second? Satellite power could be considerably reduced sampling every five minutes by putting the processor to sleep, and nothing essential would be missed. The uni profs behind this should know better.
“What did really happen to OCO-2 satellite?”
As with the rapidly withdrawn JAXA project before it, it didn’t show what it was supposed to show, for example higher CO2 concentrations appeared to be over inconvenient locations like the Southern Ocean and the Amazon rain forest than over the heavily industrialised regions in Europe and the USA.
The satellite temperature project has been similarly buried, after being launched with a great fanfare in 1979 it failed to demonstrate that the AGW was not performing as required, so the “climate scientists” reverted to harvesting their data from their traditional measuring instruments sited at the end of airport runways, outside the bak of buildings festooned with air conditioning plant and in the middle of huge areas of concrete and tarmac.
Now the only holdout still gathering and publicising the satellite data is Dr. Roy Spencer of UAH who is regarded as an unscientific crank apparently because he is apparently a Christian or possesses some similar character defect unacceptable to the Climate Hoax Community.
Thanks catweazle666 for the info about the CO2 measuring.
Any honest climate science would acknowledge that there is proven good from more CO2, but that there is no proven harm from more CO2, but there is proven harm from less CO2.
For catweazle666 Thanks for mentioning about CO2 measurements showing up over oceans more than industrial areas, that is supported by GOES 16 for GOES East and GOES West.
it sounds like someone over there woke up to the fact the this new bird will NOT prove that humans are the big source much like what catweazle666 pointed out. The coming AGW/greenhouse lockdowns and such need gloom and doom data.
Not surprised, OCO2 does not give the required results. Most damning are the immense seasonal fluctuations that indicate CO2 is not exactly a well mixed gas and its persistance is fleeting.
state-of-the-art climate observation
Meaning?
“All good things must come to an end.” ‘good’!?
Satellite data says: no Arctic sea ice trend since 2007…
CNBC and Other Media Outlets Miss the Mark Regarding NOAA’s Misleading ‘Arctic Report Card’
By Anthony Watts -December 20, 2022
https://climaterealism.com/2022/12/cnbc-and-other-media-outlets-miss-the-mark-regarding-noaas-misleading-arctic-report-card/
Reblogged this on Climate Collections.