FAILURE TO LAUNCH: The crash of the Glory satellite last week is the latest setback in NASA's attempts to maintain Earth observations--and expand scientific understanding of climate change.
Image: Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
The crash Friday of NASA's Glory satellite couldn't have come at a worse time.
The incident is a blow for climate science and the space agency's efforts to rebuild an Earth observation program weakened by years of lean budgets. It also comes during a protracted spending fight on Capitol Hill in which science agencies have become prime targets for House Republicans' budget ax.
According to NASA, problems with Glory's launch vehicle, a Taurus XL rocket, sent the climate probe crashing into the Pacific Ocean early Friday morning. The agency has begun an investigation, expected to take months, into what went wrong (Greenwire, March 4).
Preliminary data suggest that the rocket's fairing, a nose cone designed to shield Glory during the journey through Earth's atmosphere, did not detach the way it was supposed to. A similar problem two years ago caused the crash of another NASA climate satellite, the Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO).
Both satellites were considered key missions for NASA's Earth observation program, which foundered in recent years as the agency pursued new space exploration projects like the proposed mission to Mars and designing a replacement for the space shuttle.
"Working from space is hard, expensive and risky," NASA climate scientist Gavin Schmidt wrote Friday on the blog RealClimate, in a post examining the aftermath of the Glory crash. "We cannot take it for granted, and yet we need that information more than ever."
In 2007, the National Academy of Sciences warned that the nation's Earth observing capability was "at great risk" after cumulative rounds of budget cutting. The nation's ability to monitor severe weather, fresh water shortages and climate change all depended on increasing NASA's Earth science budget, the science academy said.
The losses of Glory and the Orbiting Carbon Observatory will make rebuilding that capability harder, said Rick Anthes, who co-chaired the committee that wrote the National Academy of Sciences analysis.
"When that survey came out, we expected the OCO and Glory to fly and be part of the foundation of Earth observations," said Anthes, the president of the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research.
NASA's decision to build and launch a copy of the failed Orbiting Carbon Observatory has taken money away from other key Earth and climate satellite missions, he said, and the loss of Glory could compound that problem.
"With the present budget climate in Washington, where a lot of science is at risk, it's just not good at all," Anthes said. "We really needed Glory to be successful. ... I don't think you can sugarcoat it."
Needed to measure solar impacts on climate
Glory was carrying two instruments that scientists hoped would improve the accuracy of climate models (ClimateWire, Jan. 25).
One, the Total Irradiance Monitor (TIM), was designed to extend a 32-year record of fluctuations in the sun's energy output. Those fluctuations can influence Earth's climate over the long term. The amount of sun that reaches Earth, for instance, helps determine the amount of energy that is trapped in Earth's atmosphere by greenhouse gases.
Glory's crash could create a gap in that decades-long record, experts said. The pain is multiplied by the fact that Glory's TIM was three times more accurate than the instrument it was designed to replace. The older TIM is flying aboard NASA's SORCE satellite, now in its eighth year in space. SORCE was designed to last just two and half years, and its batteries are now failing.
"I think it's a significant loss," Anthes said of Glory. "If we don't know how the sun is changing over time, if we don't know the amount of energy coming in at the top of the atmosphere, we're really hamstrung in understanding climate and solar effects on climate."
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10 Comments
Add CommentIs it just me or does this seem a little convenient that satellites key to monitoring climate change are much more likely to fail on launch. I can think of a lot of rich and powerful people who are delighted that these satellites didn't launch. Its pretty likely this one would have removed the climate skeptics fav excuse: "the sun did it". But now we'll have to wait some years for a replacement.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSee previous posts on the same subject. It was believed by many to be sabotage by big business trying to evade carbon controls.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAnthropogenic global climate change has started, the driver is population levels which imbalance the biosphere, by destroying all other life-forms. The earth is the only planet whose climate is actively managed by its biosphere.
Temperature has not started to increase, only temperature differentials have increased. Ice is a massive buffer, but melting ice increases the enthalpy (energy content) of the planet. Once most of the ice melts then temperatures will increase rapidly, the next buffer is water to water vapour conversion. Ever multicellular animal we know will be dead by then.
The question is will our biosphere have sufficient resilience to restore itself once the homo sapien is extinct. We shall not know the answer to that question.
Strangely suspicious! Does any authority suspect sabotage?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI don't really see conspiracy or sabotage here as much as I see business as usual. I spent over 20 years of my life flying in and attempting to maintain aircraft built by the lowest bidder with parts supplied by the lowest bidder. It aint always easy to make that crap work.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe theories run the entire gamut. Warmers claiming deniers sabotaged it, skeptics saying warmers were afraid they might lose their grant monies if the results didn't favor their theories, so they must have sabotaged it. NASA pointing at Orbital Sciences while OS points back at them. Fact is, the thing is in the ocean, kaput. Probably human error. My complaint is that it should have never been funded by NASA in the first place. As stated in the article, NASA is to explore space. NOAA studies the Earth and should have used their own funding to pay. NASA is dealing with budget shortfalls as it is and, rather than funding NOAA programs, whether failures or successes, should be spending on explorations of the moon, Mars, asteroids, or jovian or saturnian systems.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAs much as I would like to see some evidence that ignorant anti-earth science nuts have somehow sabotaged this "mission", common sense says it can only be continuing evidence of NASA's absolute incompetance. Twice in a row we deposit a 1/2 BILLION dollar project into the Pacific? FIRE the people who did it, and, finally, realize that NASA is totally an embarassement to the tax-payers of the USA. Disband them entirely and save BILLIONS: make America's health care at least as good as Mexico's and stop this stupid "space race" - - we've lost thru incompetance; let's admit it and move into a realistic 21st century where people count more than "super-macho" disasters. . . .over and over again. Everyone knows this was a military mission, not a scientific one. Stop it: disolve this embarrasing, incompetent organization now.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI've heard that private contractors always do a job better than the government. Orbital Services is being paid to launch payloads on their new rockets, which don't work. I think NASA solved many of those problems in the 1960s.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisBobGeezer: Scientists have been marginalised in the USA and other religious countries for years. Some good scientists have jobs with NASA. Deprive them of these jobs and the military is their only option, where they do work for idiot megalomaniacs.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe spoilers are not the majority.
Hasn't Japan's space agency also had its share of launch mishaps and malfunctions as well? I think the conspiracy theories, while entertaining, are a bit far-fetched. We've gotten to the point where space exploration matters have become "routine" as well as our expectations of them. I think this is a bit premature.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThis story is significantly flawed - it fails to mention that the NASA ACRIMSAT/ACRIM3 experiment, operational since 2000 and with at least a decade of optimum operation remaining, provides a state of the art link between the 33+ years of TSI satellite monitoring and follow-on TSI experiments. This 'faster, better, cheaper' satellite/experiment has provided 12 years of state of the art TSI monitoring at a total end-to-end cost to date of ~ 30 M$. The GLORY/TIM and TSIS experiments each cost about ten times more.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisA LASP/TRF calibrated ACRIM3 backup flight instrument is available for flight. For ~ 10% of the cost of GLORY/TIM or TSIS a replacement ACRIMSAT/ACRIM3 could be deployed and operated for a decade.