Published By National Aeronautics and Space Administration
Issued over 9 years ago
Summary
Description
The Orbiting Carbon Observatory is the first NASA mission designed to collect space-based measurements of atmospheric carbon dioxide with the precision, resolution, and coverage needed to characterize the processes controlling its buildup in the atmosphere. The OCO-2 project uses the LEOStar-2 spacecraft that carries a single instrument. It incorporates three high-resolution spectrometers that make coincident measurements of reflected sunlight in the near-infrared CO2 near 1.61 and 2.06 μm and in molecular oxygen (O2) A-Band at 0.76 μm This collection is the output from the algorithm retrieving the column-averaged CO2 dry air mole fraction XCO2 and other quantities from the spectra collected by the Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 (OCO-2).