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National Aeronautics and Space Administration

CMS-Relevant Missions

The following missions and instruments may contribute observations useful for prototyping carbon monitoring systems. All of the following Missions and Instruments should enable major scientific advances for the further development of prototype carbon monitoring systems on land, air and sea.

Planned Orbital Missions

ECOSTRESS—ECOsystem Spaceborne Thermal Radiometer Experiment on Space Station
Launch: 2018
Platform: International Space Station
Status: Future, Formulation
Category: Venture Class, Earth Venture-Instrument
Instrument Plans: ECOSTRESS is a thermal sensor that will detect the timing, location, and predictive factors leading to plant water uptake decline.

GEDI—Global Ecosystem Dynamics Investigation Lidar
Launch: 2018
Platform: International Space Station
Status: Future, Formulation
Category: Venture Class, Earth Venture-Instrument
Instrument Plans: GEDI will use wave-form lidars to measure the three-dimension structure of forests for a two-year period. It is manifested for launch on SpaceX-18.

GeoCarb
Launch: 2022
Status: Future, Formulation
Category: Venture Class, Earth Venture-Instrument
Instrument Plans: GeoCarb will pioneer the quantification and monitoring of the carbon stocks of North, Central and South America from geostationary orbit. The NASA instrument, to be launched on a commercial communications satellite, will collect 10 million observations a day of carbon dioxide, methane, and carbon monoxide from a geostationary orbit.

NISAR—NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar
Launch: 2021 NISAR image
Status: Future, Pre-Formulation
Category: Earth Systematic Missions
Instrument Plans: NISAR is an L-Band and S-Band SAR satellite designed to measure forest biomass and map the extents of forest disturbance, wetland area, and agricultural croplands at global scales.

OCO-3—Orbiting Carbon Observatory 3  
Launch: 2018 OCO3 logo
Platform: International Space Station  
Status: Implementation  
Category: ESSP, Other  
Instrument Plans: OCO-3 is designed to collect the space-based measurements needed to quantify variations in the column averaged atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) dry air mole fraction, XCO2, with the precision, resolution, and coverage needed to improve our understanding of surface CO2 sources and sinks (fluxes) on regional scales (>=1000 km) and the processes controlling their variability over the seasonal cycle.

PACE—Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud, Ocean Ecosystem
Launch: 2022 PACE logo
Status: Decadal Survey 2007, Future Pre-Formulation  
Category: Earth Systematic Missions  
Instrument Plans: PACE will provide systematic observations and continuity for ongoing ocean color research, systematic observations of aerosol and clouds in the climate record, and enhanced ocean color remote sensing over a broad spectrum.  

Current Airborne Instruments

ASCENDS—Active Sensing of CO2 Emissions over Nights, Days, & Seasons
NASA is honing new carbon dioxide measurement techniques and technologies from onboard its DC-8 aircraft during the Active Sensing of CO2 Emissions over Nights, Days and Seasons (ASCENDS) mission. The systems use lasers to measure the amount of carbon dioxide in the air between the instrument and Earth’s surface. Existing satellites use reflected sunlight to gauge carbon dioxide, so they only work in daylight conditions. ASCENDS logo

G-LiHT—Goddard's LiDar, Hyperspectral & Thermal Imager
G-LiHT is a portable, airborne imaging system that simultaneously maps the composition, structure, and function of terrestrial ecosystems. ASCENDS logo

LVIS—Land, Vegetation, and Ice Sensor
Platform: NASA C-130, Global Hawk ASCENDS logo
A scanning laser altimeter instrument that is flown, by aircraft, over target areas to collect data on surface topography and vegetation coverage.  
   

UAVSAR—Uninhabited Aerial Vehicle Synthetic Aperture Radar
Platform: NASA Gulfstream III aircraft and eventually on uninhabited aerial vehicles. UAVSAR logo
Imaging radar instrument that collects key measurements of Earth deformation. When flown over the same area multiple times, it can determine how land features have changed. So far, it has been put to work studying climate change in the Arctic and examining Earth deformation after major earthquakes and volcanoes.