Orbiting Carbon Observatories (OCO) Program Latest News
Recently, the Trump administration asked to shut down NASA’s Orbiting Carbon Observatories (OCO) program.
About Orbiting Carbon Observatories (OCO) Program
- OCOs are a series of dedicated Earth remote sensing satellites that were designed specifically to observe atmospheric CO2 from space in order to better understand the characteristics of climate change.
Timeline of Observatories
- The first mission of the series failed soon after launch in February 2009.
- A replacement satellite, OCO-2, was launched in July 2014. It was built based on the original OCO mission to minimise cost, schedule, and performance impacts.
- In 2019, a third mission, OCO-3, was sent to the International Space Station (ISS) to further enhance the observation of atmospheric CO2.
Importance of Orbiting Carbon Observatories
- NASA and other agencies have used the data to create high-resolution maps of plant growth around the world.
- That’s useful to farmers, useful to rangeland and grazing and drought monitoring and forest mapping and all kinds of things, in addition to the CO2 measurements.
- The data have been used by the US Department of Agriculture and many private agricultural consulting companies to forecast and track crop yields and drought conditions.
Source: IE
Last updated on January, 2026
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Orbiting Carbon Observatories (OCO) Program FAQs
Q1. What did the orbiting carbon observatory (OCO2) launched by NASA aim to measure?+
Q2. What is the resolution of OCO-2?+
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