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OCO launch failure

By catdynamics on February 24, 2009.

NASA's Orbiting Carbon Observatory had a launch failure.

Taurus launch out of Vandenberg last night, tried to stay up to see if I could see the launch - often possible from the area - but I crashed before scheduled launch time.

Apparently payload failed to separate after stage burnout and the whole lot crashed near one of the poles (south pole - thought that was what they said but wasn't sure till I saw the formal press release).
Total loss.

I guess we know what NASA's SMD will use their $400M stimulus for now - that should just about buy a replacement.

It is a bad loss, the OCO, or something like it, should have gone up a long time ago and the data would be very useful.

Cool launch video. Eh.

More good stuff at the JPL site

PS: as per comments pointing to UnMannedSpaceFlight.com there is a similar japanese mission: Ibuki - which was launched successfully a month ago and is operational.

slightly different tech: 4 band FTS with 3 day coverage vs 3 band NIR dispersive with 16 day coverage - looks like OCO had somewhat higher spectral resolution, if I did the wavenumber (eurgh) conversion correctly in my head.
Would actually have been useful to have both overlapping to cross-calibrate - y'know like if it turns out there is a humungous sink of CO2 in the south pacific, or a giant point source under the antarctic ice cap or some such....

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Steinn, over at http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com, someone pointed out that Japan is flying a satellite called "Ibuki" which is performing a very similar mission. Here's a Jaxa link:
http://www.jaxa.jp/projects/sat/gosat/index_e.html

(I also recommend the unmannedspaceflight.com forum - it has some contributors who are actively involved with various missions, and other contributors who seem to be even more knowledgeable than the first group!)

The problem was not that the payload didn't separate from the rocket, but that the payload fairing didn't drop off at the appropriate time. This is the nose cone that protects the satellite during flight through the lower atmosphere. It's normally dropped a few seconds into second stage flight, when the rocket has climbed above most of the atmosphere. The extra weight of the fairing kept the rocket from reaching orbit, which is why the whole thing crashed near Antarctica.