Rocket crashes with CSU device to measure CO2

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More than a decade of work and planning by two Colorado State University scientists plunged into Antarctic waters Tuesday when a $240 million satellite failed to get into orbit.

“Sometimes, you forget how much risk there is in trying to get a delicate instrument into space by exploding a rocket off the Earth’s surface,” said Graeme Stephens, a CSU distinguished professor.

Stephens and Denis O’Brien, a senior CSU researcher, were to lead an international team translating data from the satellite into the most detailed measurements ever made of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

They had been working on the concept since 1995, Stephens said. The satellite that launched Tuesday was eight years in development.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration will form a “mishap investigation board” to determine why the satellite could not get free of a protective cover, said NASA spokesman Alan Buis.

The Orbiting Carbon Observatory was a telephone-booth-size instrument to measure carbon dioxide from the stratosphere to the ground.

Carbon dioxide is a heat-trapping gas linked to climate change. Human activities, such as burning fossil fuels, are one source of the gas.

Some carbon dioxide, however, is absorbed by oceans and plants, and tracking the global profile of the gas has been difficult, said A. Scott Denning, a CSU atmospheric scientist.

“OCO was going to revolutionize our field,” Denning said.

The Taurus LX rocket launched early Tuesday from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California and reached its initial orbit 398 miles above the Earth. But the clam-shell-like protective covering, called a fairing, failed to open.

“The fairing failed, and the satellite wasn’t born,” Stephens said. Instead, the package plummeted to Earth, landing in the ocean near Antarctica.

Denning, who was planning to use the data in computer models to track global carbon, woke up just before 2 a.m. to see the launch on the Internet.

“It went very fast,” he said. “The launch went smoothly.” Then, a few minutes later, mission control announced, “We are declaring a mission contingency.”

“The screen went blank,” Denning said, “and you just knew something terrible had happened.”