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Photograph courtesy of NASA |
Like most things, satellites aren鈥檛 meant to last forever. The ones that track climate change will soon die out, and the next generation of orbiters isn鈥檛 scheduled to launch for at least five years, National Public Radio last Friday.
As climate-monitoring satellites age, they鈥檒l stop providing data. Without new satellites in space to measure things like minute increases in sea level or decreases in ice thickness, scientists will have holes in the climate record, leaving them unable to see the consequences of climate change. And now that the world is beginning to experience the first effects of global warming, policy makers will have to speculate about what steps to take in order to mitigate damage.
"鈥橶e'll be blind for maybe a decade,鈥 says Kathy Kelly, an oceanographer at the University of Washington who depends on satellite data for her research.鈥
Two government agencies, NASA and the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), both focus on climate, but neither has made it their first priority, said NASA climate scientist Bruce Wielicki in the piece. Budget cuts and infighting haven鈥檛 helped. In order to remedy the problem, the new NOAA head is planning on creating a new agency: the National Climate Service. That agency will be able to send new climate-change monitoring satellites into orbit in five to ten years.
NASA attempted to launch a carbon-sink monitoring satellite into space last month, as we reported . Unfortunately, the mission failed and the satellite crashed back onto earth. Thankfully, the U.S. isn鈥檛 the only country collecting data. Japan sent a greenhouse gas detecting satellite into space in January.
The Greenhouse Gases Observing Satellite, or GOSAT, 鈥溾檌s designed to observe the global distribution of greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide and methane, from space. I am convinced and excited that GOSAT will play an important role in the understanding of global warming,鈥 said Takashi Hamazaki,鈥 the project manager in an on space.com.
Obviously it鈥檚 important to space out, especially when a satellite鈥檚 orbit helps us learn more about our own planet.