By: Julia Hedelman
Our Earth is being destroyed everyday: deforestation, pollution, floods, droughts, wildfires, you name it. “The cause?” you may ask, humans. Every year humans are emitting up to 36 billion metric tons of CO2 per year into the atmosphere. Deforestation is having a bigger impact on our Earth than ever imagined. Less trees and plants means less photosynthesis, and less photosynthesis means less oxygen, and with less oxygen all living organisms are at risk for extinction. Photosynthesis has and always will be the process that makes human life sustainable, “photosynthesis is the biggest carbon uptake on the globe… and basically releases oxygen for us as humans to breathe,” says our interviewee German NASA scientist Dr. Frankenburg. He and his team want to explore this problem, and how the carbon cycle has been affected by climate change.
Frankenburg and his team were finally successful in creating NASA’s first greenhouse gas satellite named OCO-2 (Orbiting Carbon Observatory) which was launched on June 30, 2014. But how does it work? Why should it be important to me?
Well, OCO-2 has the ability to measure Photosynthetic activity from outer space. By using high resolution spectrometers and taking photos of areas with high chlorophyll fluorescence (areas with lots of plants) scientists can now “measure something that’s happening within a leaf, basically on a molecular level, and we can really see the signal from space.”
When a plant goes through photosynthesis, it absorbs photosynthetic active radiation (the energy input to the plant) and a fraction of that energy always goes into fluorescence, which is what Frankenburg is measuring. In an ideal world, the measurements of fluorescence and energy would stay constant, but when using OCO-2 Frankenburg quickly discovered that this was usually not the case. If these two measurements are not equal, it is a sign that the crop/forest is going through water stress, so in principle, the satellite can detect a water stress it actually begins. This, is many of the pros the OCO-2 brings to the table. If humans were able to see a drought or flood before it actually began, new irrigation systems could be put into system to save crops, money, lives and food before it is too late.
Frankenburg hopes that OCO-2 will be able to uncover the mystery of our carbon cycle. “We can use this atmospheric CO2 data to infer fluxes of CO2 across the land atmospherically.. So we will gain information on how the natural carbon cycle works and where the sources of CO2 are located- this is the primary mission objective of the OCO-2.” With climate change becoming more and more of a reality, OCO-2 could be a major breakthrough for our scientific world in uncovering the many mysteries of the Carbon Cycle. To learn more about this project or Dr. Frankenburg, refer to the links below:
oco2.jpl.nasa.gov
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