Greg Kopp, a scientist at the University of Colorado, Boulder, laboratory that developed the TIM instrument, said he's also "very worried about maintaining the existing 32-year [solar energy] record with the required good stability and accuracy needed for climate science."
Experts said NASA has at least three options to avert a potential data gap. Kopp said the agency could assemble spare parts for a new version of TIM and fly a replacement instrument on a satellite already under construction. That could be done in less than two years if NASA can identify a probe to host the TIM replacement.
Meanwhile, Erik Richard, another scientist at the same University of Colorado lab, said NASA could opt to accelerate its planned launch of the instrument designed to replace Glory's TIM. Richard said his lab will finish building that instrument by the end of 2012, although it's not expected to be sent into space until 2015. "Since it's early with the Glory failure, there may be a lot of shuffling," he said.
In the meantime, Richard and his colleagues submitted paperwork Friday to extend the operational life of the SORCE satellite from 2012 to 2014. With Glory gone, Richard said NASA may opt to shut down SORCE's instruments except for its solar energy-measuring TIM.
That could keep the SORCE instrument running and achieve enough overlap with data from a new European solar energy-measuring satellite, PICARD, to ward off a data gap. It's not a sure thing. The French team in charge of PICARD, which launched in June 2010, still hasn't released data from the satellite's solar energy monitor. As for SORCE, "another two years is an optimistic plan," Richard said. "As with all of these older satellites, you never know what will crop up."
Aerosol puzzle continues
Glory was also carrying an instrument to measure how tiny particles called aerosols influence Earth's climate.
Different types of aerosols behave differently in the atmosphere. Some reflect sunlight, cooling the climate, while others absorb heat from the sun, warming the climate. Aerosols also affect the climate indirectly, by influencing the behavior of clouds and patterns of precipitation.
Glory's Aerosol Polarimetry Sensor would have allowed researchers to distinguish between the types and amounts of different aerosols in the atmosphere, something existing instruments can't do. That's crucial because scientists believe that aerosols exert an influence on the climate roughly equal to that of greenhouse gases, but that estimate carries a large margin of error -- "at least a factor of two, if not more," said V. Ramanathan of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography.
Ramanathan said the loss of Glory's APS would affect his ongoing work to determine the climate impact of one type of aerosol, black carbon, which is produced by burning fossil fuels and biofuels like wood and dung.
Tiny particles of black carbon are potent, though short-lived, warmers. They absorb heat from sunlight, warming surrounding air and, when they fall from the atmosphere onto ice or snow, hastening melting. With policymakers increasingly interested in cutting black carbon to help limit the severity of climate change, "the Glory instrument was going to really take us to the next stage in settling the debate, and quantifying it better," Ramanathan said.
The scientist said he had also planned on using data from Glory in an experiment next fall that is designed to examine how deposits of dust are affecting the annual spring snowmelt in the Colorado Rockies.
Recent field research by Tom Painter, a snow hydrologist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, suggests that dust produced by poor agricultural practices is causing the snowpack that feeds the Colorado River to melt earlier and reduces the amount of water that reaches the river.
Ramanathan and Painter had planned to fly three unmanned aerial vehicles equipped with aerosol-monitoring sensors over a 4-square-mile area of the Rockies next fall. By comparing the data collected by the UAVs with data from Glory's aerosol sensor, the scientists believed they'd be able to extend their analysis to cover the entire Rockies.
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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.