Scientists know that there's a lot more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere than there used to be in decades past. What they don't know as precisely as they'd like is where it all comes from and where it all ends up. To help put an end to that uncertainty, NASA planned to launch early Tuesday a satellite called the Orbiting Carbon Observatory.
Over the next two years or more, the satellite (seen here in an artist's rendering) was expected to take about 8 million measurements every 16 days to provide a much more detailed picture of how carbon dioxide is distributed around the globe.
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