The Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO) satellite was all set to launch. Its mission: find Earth’s missing carbon dioxide—our main greenhouse gas that vanishes each year. NASA’s $285-million US satellite got off the ground OK last month. But OCO didn’t make it into orbit.
Meanwhile, CanX, a microsatellite that does what OCO was supposed to do, chugs along happily in orbit. Canada’s University of Toronto launched the 30-centimetre-
The tiny CanX’s job, like OCO’s, is to find Earth’s missing CO2 greenhouse gas.
“The measurement principle is almost exactly the same as the one for the OCO,” says Ben Quine, the director of space engineering at York University, which made the Argus measuring device aboard CanX. “It’s very sad when you lose a spacecraft, but it also means that we are the only people in orbit with one-kilometer resolution on the ground. Argus is the lowest-possible-
York’s Argus device can look below at small details from its orbit 700 kilometers above Earth. A Japanese satellite does the same job, but can only see features more than 10 km wide.
“Clearly if we’re going to do something about climate change, we need to understand where CO2 is produced and particularly where it’s absorbed. That’s much less clear,” Quine says.
The satellite can analyze how much carbon dioxide is in a particular place. If it locates an area where levels of the gas have dropped below the global average, this may be where the gas is being absorbed. Smart money says that oceans are involved; they either soak up carbon dioxide in water, or their ocean life absorbs it.
The CanX satellite is about the size of a milk carton, and it weighs 3.5 kilos (about 5 lbs)—less than one per cent of OCO’s weight. Launch costs are low, because many microsatellites can share the same launch rocket. And students sharing in the effort keep the labor costs down.
CanX has a nominal lifespan of two years (as did OCO) but may last longer. Quine hopes a network of little satellites that could can soon do the job of large individual satellites. And Orbee knows they can.
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