Orbiting Carbon Observatory mission fails during launch

Three high-resolution spectrometers aboard the satellite were built to focus on specific, narrow color ranges that show relative amounts of carbon dioxide and molecular oxygen -- essentially, more light getting through to the spectrometers means less carbon dioxide in a given area.

"Essentially, if you visualize a column of air that stretches from Earth's surface to the top of the atmosphere, the Orbiting Carbon Observatory [was built to] identify how much of that vertical column is carbon dioxide, with an understanding that most is emitted at the surface," Gregg Marland of Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Oak Ridge, Tenn., said in a NASA statement in January. "Simply, it will act like a plane observing the smoke from forest fires down below, with the task of assessing where the fires are and how big they are. Compare that aerial capability with sending a lot of people into the forest looking for fires. In this vein, the observatory [was to use] its vantage point from space to peer down and capture a picture of where the sources and sinks of carbon dioxide are, rather than our cobbling data together from multiple sources with less frequency, reliability and detail."