OCO-2 Observatory Conducts Environmental Tests
NASA's Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO)-2 spacecraft is moved into a thermal
vacuum chamber at Orbital Sciences Corporation's Satellite Manufacturing
Facility in Gilbert, Ariz., for a series of environmental tests. The tests
confirmed the integrity of the observatory's electrical connections and
subjected the OCO-2 instrument and spacecraft to the extreme hot, cold and
airless environment they will encounter once in orbit. The observatory's solar
array panels were removed prior to the test.
OCO-2 is NASA's first mission dedicated to studying atmospheric carbon
dioxide and is the latest mission in NASA's study of the global carbon cycle.
Carbon dioxide is the most significant human-produced greenhouse gas and the
principal human-produced driver of climate change. The mission will uniformly
sample the atmosphere above Earth's land and ocean, collecting between 100,000
and 200,000 measurements of carbon dioxide concentration over Earth's sunlit
hemisphere every day for at least two years. It will do so with the accuracy,
resolution and coverage needed to provide the first complete picture of the
regional-scale geographic distribution and seasonal variations of both human and
natural sources of carbon dioxide emissions as well as the places where carbon
dioxide is removed from the atmosphere and stored.
Image Credit: Orbital Sciences
Corporation/NASA/JPL-Caltech
NASA
Guillermo Gonzalo Sánchez Achutegui
ayabaca@gmail.com
ayabaca@hotmail.com
ayabaca@yahoo.com
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