Glory Satellite Takeoff

A satellite that was supposed to monitor the sun’s effect on climate change and global warning, has for the second time in two years failed to launch. In 2009 the first climate satellite was supposed to make orbit and track the effect of different elements on the current climate. The protective covering of the satellite did not break off so it did not have the secondary thrust required for it to break through the atmosphere and into orbit. The same problem that happened in 2009, happened again in 2011.

Both satellite and rocket are now in the Pacific Ocean, probably not to far away from its predecessor. The satellite, Glory, did not retrieve any information whatsoever.

The rocket type, Taurus XL had been launched nine times before, six of those times successfully. The satellite failure has cost NASA roughly $54 million.

Some of the questions that were supposed to be answered by the satellite were, how much of man made carbon emissions are re-absorbed into the Earth and how much is trapped? And what is the extent of the threat of global warming.

The satellite Glory was supposed to set critics of NASA at ease. NASA has been criticized of spending too much time and money studying other planets and not enough effort into learning about our planet, Earth.

“We have a very weakened Earth observing system just at a time where we need every bit of data that we could possibly get,” says Elisabeth Holland a senior member of the National Center for Atmospheric research.

“The NASA team does the things that are important, not necessarily the things that are easy,” Said NASA Earth Science Director Mike Freilich going on to say The loss of Glory will mostly hurt projections and modeling of future climate change.

NASA is planning to re-launch the global warming satellite again in another two years in 2013. NASA officials say they should be able to fix the problems that have caused the last to attempts to go down by then, although, isn’t that what they said last time? The information the satellite would have given us is crucially important, NASA will stop at nothing until they determine they understand our currently climate situation to the best of their abilities, something they cannot say right now.

Sources:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/02/24/nasa-satellite-taurus-xl-_n_169425.html

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_SCI_GLORY_SATELLITE?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2011-03-04-07-48-04