After failed space flights, NASA investigation leads to Portland, The Oregonian “Twice in the past decade, NASA launched unmanned spacecraft ferrying advanced satellites into Earth’s orbit as part of a mission that could offer researchers an unprecedented new source of data on climate change. But the satellites failed to deploy and, within minutes, NASA’s $550 million investment and years of work vaporized in fiery balls of space junk. NASA has […]

NASA Prepares to Launch Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 The spacecraft will sample the global geographic distribution of the sources and sinks of carbon dioxide and allow scientists to study their changes over time more completely than can be done with any existing data. Since 2009, Earth scientists have been preparing for OCO-2 by taking advantage of observations from the Japanese GOSAT satellite. OCO-2 replaces a nearly identical NASA spacecraft lost because […]

NASA Suspends Payments on Launch Contract with Orbital, Space News “Dulles, Va.-based Orbital remains under contract to build OCO-2, a duplicate of the $200 million carbon-mapping satellite destroyed in a 2009 Taurus XL launch failure blamed on payload-fairing separation error. However, the $68.1 million NASA had budgeted for a February 2013 Taurus XL launch of OCO-2 has been “temporarily put on hold” as the agency evaluates “launch services options for […]

NASA’s Glory Satellite Fails To Reach Orbit “NASA’s Glory mission launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California Friday at 5:09:45 a.m. EST failed to reach orbit. Telemetry indicated the fairing, the protective shell atop the Taurus XL rocket, did not separate as expected about three minutes after launch.” Education Satellites Hitch Ride on Glory Mission “P-PODs are aluminum containers measuring about 5 inches square by about 16 inches long. […]