Mourning the Loss of OCO

This morning, the Taurus XL rocket that was to shepherd the Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO) to its orbit, 700 km above the Earth's surface, failed deliver its payload. According to the press conference, the Taurus XL fairing (the shell that protects a payload during launch) failed to separate at its scheduled time. The added mass of the fairing prevented the second stage of the rocket from boosting OCO into its orbit. The fairing, with its precious cargo inside, plummeted into the Antarctic Ocean. OCO was the first NASA mission dedicated to measuring CO2 in the atmosphere. Its data would have given NASA Earth scientists a view into the sources, cycles, and sinks of CO2 in the atmosphere, leading to a better understanding of the inputs to global warming processes.

Today, I personally mourn the loss of OCO. I was driving to work at Goddard Space Flight Center this morning when I heard a local radio station announce that "NASA had lost a mission to understand global warming." My heart sunk. I yelled out loud "No, no no! Don't let it be OCO! Don't let it be OCO!" even though I knew in my heart that it was exactly that spacecraft we had lost. It's weird to say that I'm mourning the loss of a satellite. After all, it is only an inanimate object. But being so close to LRO, a mission that's only months out from launching, I understand all too well the amount of effort it takes to design, build, and launch one of these precious commodities. My sadness is felt for those people who were involved in the mission in addition to the loss of the precious scientific data (and resulting understanding) that OCO would have brought.

The wealth of understanding about the Earth we have gained from the fleet of spacecraft in orbit around the Earth is priceless. We will continue to design and build spacecraft that help us understand and protect the Blue Marble we call home. That's what we do, and we do a fine job of it.

Spreading the word

I have tried several strategies to bring people to "Adventures in Earth and Space". I post on Twitter when we update, and I have included the link in both my work and home email accounts as well as on facebook. Today Len Edgerly pointed me in a new direction with a post on twitter about Blog Rush, a widget to designed to promote blogs by subject area, based on traffic to a site. I'm going to give it a try. I would love to have others who are interested in earth and space science education find the site. So check out the "From the Blogsphere" box on this page to see other education-related blogs.

Three new NASA Explorer Schools (NES) come to Goddard

Yesterday I had the opportunity to meet with the members of the three new NES for the Goddard service region and show them all of the great professional development opportunities related to Aura. One of the members of the Goddard Office of Education arranged to have all of the Earth Science educators from center come and give a ten to fifteen minute preview of their educational programs. The new NES schools were treated to a smorgasbord of materials from Aura, IceSat, Landsat 7, and MESSENGER. Wearing my Aura hat, I offered opportunities to be trained on materials relating to air quality (ozone and NO2 production) and the stratospheric ozone layer (ultraviolet radiation). The NES team was particularly interested in the ultraviolet activities, and was very adamant about getting me to visit Elizabeth, NJ to give a professional development workshop! One member from each of the teams were grouped together and given an introduction to the Aura Ozone Monitoring Garden by my colleague Jeannie Allen. All in all, the teams seemed extremely interested in getting their hands on the wealth of materials GSFC Earth Science had to offer, which was great!

First Post

I develop and implement education and outreach programs for NASA Earth and Space science missions. As education and public outreach (EPO) specialists, my team and I are always looking for innovative ways to engage people in NASA missions. We work in the K-12 community, with museums, planetariums,after-school programs, filmmakers and youth groups. Of course our missions have websites and many of our educational activities and products are posted on NASA websites. But lately we have started looking at other venues on the web, like YouTube and Second Life. I have the geosteph channel on YouTube and have uploaded a number of video podcasts and other videos developed for public engagement. I've also created a playlists on Pluto and the New Horizons mission to the Kuiper Belt.

So here I am, a new blogger, looking to share our projects and looking for ways to involve more people in our missions.