Watching the satellite go down

In late January, I posted an online news story about a new satellite that had been launched by the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency. That orbiter carries an ABB analyzer and is designed to monitor atmospheric levels of greenhouse gasses. Some other folks took notice of the article, and shortly thereafter, I got a call from a PR agency asking if I wanted to talk to some engineers at Orbital Sciences Corporation of Dulles, VA. Orbital Sciences was making final preparations to launch its own greenhouse gas monitoring satellite.

We have the Inside Energy section coming up in our April issue, so I thought such a chat would be in order, and I could write up something on how that type of analyzer technology operates when the device is above the atmosphere that it’s supposed to be monitoring. Before we managed to have that discussion, I was reading the Chicago Tribune over breakfast on February 25 and saw an article with the headline "Crash dashes hopes–Lost satellite was to monitor levels of CO₂." Sadly, that was Orbital Sciences’ satellite. The enclosure that protects the device during launch was supposed to fall away as it left the atmosphere, but it didn’t and the whole payload crashed into the ocean without ever reaching orbit. Later, I saw an article about the same incident in The Economist with one of their characteristically clever headlines.

As you might guess, I never had the chat with Orbital Sciences. The loss of a device that cost $278 million must have put them off the idea. I can’t blame them. This was their first failure after 56 successful launches.