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The ASCENDS acronym

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is the name of this mission for measuring carbon dioxide.

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One of the exciting things about this project is that you can actually

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watch trees eat and breathe.

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Of course, trees are breathing all the time, but they are only eating, meaning,

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performing photosynthesis when the sun is out.  The main science

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is to measure how much carbon dioxide there is in the atmosphere,

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at this particular time on the Earth, how much is there total

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and where is it located. Turns out that when you burn

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materials, then a lot of carbon dioxide comes off.  If you could see it,

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it would look like smoke and it stays, it is also a little heavier than the air,

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it stays in the lower part of the atmosphere. And that carbon dioxide

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has been tied into warming of the atmosphere.

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That is key interest to us on the planet.

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The great thing about a laser instrument is that is can make the measurement both

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in the daytime and the nighttime, because it is its own light source.

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It doesn't count on the sun being out to make these measurements.

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The way that we evolve the carbon dioxide instrument is we use a small gas cylinder.

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By doing that we can put a controlled amount of

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carbon dioxide in there, basically 100%, and it allows

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us to make that measurement, which we are ultimately going to measure

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from space. It allows us to make it in a controlled way not using air,

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but with a big absorption in a very small,

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physical footprint. So we can do the measurement on our lab bench.

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Then, the next step is we make measurements across the parking lot.

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We hang the target on the cell phone tower and then we direct our

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laser beam to that tower, the light hits the target, comes back to us,

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now we can measure all of the light in the column of air between our

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laboratory and the cell phone tower. The amount of data

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coming down from the carbon dioxide sounder is not an unwieldy amount.

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Again, we're interested in measuring ten-kilometer

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squares on the Earth averaged over a month, and then measuring how much

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carbon dioxide is there. So, typically our job here is to

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look at what is happening in the commercial field, what is happening

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elsewhere in the government, and try to leverage that to build a science

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instrument. You know, we are doing our best to make use of the resources

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that are there, but also we want to see what technologies are going to evolve

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without a lot of additional funding so that we can take advantage of its evolution.

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But now, we are talking about maybe making that measurement from Mars as well.

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The carbon dioxide instrument, you know, is probably one of the most exciting things

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that anybody could be working on at this time in history.

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We have this new technology, the fiber lasers to work on it.

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We have this incredible need to measure the health

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of the Earth over time. We have this great place NASA

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that is set up to bring the scientists and the technologists

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together to do that. It really just does not get much better than that.

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I mean everything has come together. There is great synergy there.

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Beep, Beep, Beep