I knew that the Orbiting Carbon Observatory launched yesterday, so I went over to Wikipedia this evening to find out more about it. When I read, “The Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO) was a NASA satellite mission that was intended to provide global space-based observations of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2),” I immediately noticed the past-tense. At first I thought someone had made a mistake.

Then I thought, “aw crap.”

The Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO) was a NASA satellite mission that was intended to provide global space-based observations of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2). It was lost in a launch failure on February 24, 2009, when the payload fairing of the Taurus rocket which was carrying it failed to separate during ascent. The added mass of the fairing prevented the satellite from reaching orbit. It subsequently re-entered the atmosphere and crashed into the Indian Ocean near Antarctica. Launch had occurred at 09:55:30 GMT.

The OCO satellite was supposed to measure the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere; key information to monitor global warming and get quantitative information about global climate change. Losing that satellite is really pretty terrible news.

More about all of this here: NASA mission to monitor carbon dioxide fails