Last week's failed mission to place the $424 million Glory satellite into orbit doesn't just stymie scientists' efforts to maintain a 33-year record of the sun's brightness and discern the role of aerosol particles in the atmosphere. It's a blow to an already shaky and likely underfunded effort to revamp the troubled U.S. remote observation system.
The issue is a crowded to-do list and increased pressure from Congress to cut the budget. NASA has already spent hundreds of millions of dollars on a number of key environmental satellite missions still on the ground, so it's likely those missions will fly eventually. They include the Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO-II) mission to track carbon dioxide flows and the LDCM satellite to maintain observations of Earth's surface (both planned for a 2013 launch), as well as ICESat-2, which monitors the melting poles, scheduled for 2016. But NASA needs hundreds of millions more to finish work on some of them, including nearly $500 million for ICESat-2.
Glory's failure exacerbates both the scientific and the fiscal problems facing NASA. The collection of aerosol data represented novel and important science. The solar brightness mission, however, is as close to a must-do as it gets in all of climate science. Solar brightness measures the total energy added to the Earth system, which is needed for estimating global warming from greenhouse gases. Maintaining a record started by a 1978 mission requires calibration between satellites that overlap during their flights.
But NASA can't just put a Glory-II mission at the end of its calendar and hope for the best. The current craft measuring brightness is 3 years beyond its working life, and another is not expected until 2015. So NASA may try to push that date up.
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http://news.sciencemag.org/scienceinsider/2011/03/nasa-satellite-crash-complicates.html?ref=hp
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