Yesterday morning we heard that the Orbiting Carbon Observatory mission launch failed to insert the satellite into orbit, and it is presumably measuring carbon dioxide somewhere at the bottom of the Southern Ocean. The Japanese Ibuki satellite launched last month will measure CO2 but with a very different footprint than OCO would have used, and the AIRS instrument on Aqua has been used to produce a timeseries of mid-troposphere CO2 concentrations since 2004. Nonetheless, both of these other missions should provide some of the information that was anticipated from OCO - though not at the spatial resolution envisaged.

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