1 00:00:00,533 --> 00:00:04,204 (light digital intro music) 2 00:00:05,238 --> 00:00:08,241 - [Narrator] When someone mentions NASA, what comes to mind? 3 00:00:09,542 --> 00:00:11,544 Astronauts on the moon? 4 00:00:11,544 --> 00:00:13,279 The space station? 5 00:00:13,279 --> 00:00:15,115 Rovers on Mars? 6 00:00:15,115 --> 00:00:17,917 The Voyagers now flying through interstellar space? 7 00:00:19,386 --> 00:00:21,654 But there's no place NASA has explored more 8 00:00:21,654 --> 00:00:22,922 than our own planet. 9 00:00:23,823 --> 00:00:26,826 NASA has a fleet of satellites that are constantly 10 00:00:26,826 --> 00:00:29,629 collecting data to monitor the health of the Earth. 11 00:00:31,498 --> 00:00:35,301 Using the vantage point of space to understand our planet 12 00:00:35,301 --> 00:00:38,471 dates back to the beginnings of the space age. 13 00:00:38,471 --> 00:00:40,874 (pondering music) 14 00:00:40,874 --> 00:00:42,942 (rocket engines firing) 15 00:00:42,942 --> 00:00:46,746 It was then, in response to the Soviet Union Sputnik, 16 00:00:46,746 --> 00:00:48,648 that JPL built and helped launch 17 00:00:48,648 --> 00:00:51,584 the first U.S. satellite, Explorer 1. 18 00:00:54,087 --> 00:00:56,923 Inside Explorer was this science instrument, 19 00:00:56,923 --> 00:01:00,760 a kind of Geiger counter designed to detect cosmic rays. 20 00:01:02,896 --> 00:01:05,131 It also discovered the presence of radiation 21 00:01:05,131 --> 00:01:06,966 surrounding the Earth. 22 00:01:06,966 --> 00:01:09,636 What turned out to be a belt of charged particles 23 00:01:09,636 --> 00:01:11,905 held in place by Earth's magnetic field. 24 00:01:13,406 --> 00:01:16,342 They are named the Van Allen Radiation Belts, 25 00:01:16,342 --> 00:01:19,813 for the scientist who built Explorer's Geiger counter. 26 00:01:19,813 --> 00:01:22,348 This was the very first science discovery 27 00:01:22,348 --> 00:01:23,450 made from space. 28 00:01:24,984 --> 00:01:27,854 A major finding about our planet, 29 00:01:27,854 --> 00:01:29,722 for these belts shield the Earth, 30 00:01:29,722 --> 00:01:32,092 deflecting solar particles that would otherwise 31 00:01:32,092 --> 00:01:35,361 shred our atmosphere, over time destroying it 32 00:01:35,361 --> 00:01:38,064 and everything about our planet as we know it to be. 33 00:01:40,333 --> 00:01:42,502 - More than half a century has passed 34 00:01:42,502 --> 00:01:44,871 since the time of Explorer 1. 35 00:01:44,871 --> 00:01:47,874 And today we know that our planet is changing in ways 36 00:01:47,874 --> 00:01:49,075 we need to understand. 37 00:01:49,943 --> 00:01:53,146 I'm Mike Meacham, a systems engineer here at JPL. 38 00:01:54,013 --> 00:01:57,283 The job of a systems engineer is to look at the big picture 39 00:01:57,283 --> 00:01:59,552 of how all different parts of a spacecraft 40 00:01:59,552 --> 00:02:02,255 are supposed to interact as one system, 41 00:02:02,255 --> 00:02:03,823 and to make sure that they do. 42 00:02:04,757 --> 00:02:07,527 The Earth is a system too, with many parts: 43 00:02:09,062 --> 00:02:14,033 the land, the ice caps, the oceans, the atmosphere, 44 00:02:14,834 --> 00:02:16,002 and living things. 45 00:02:18,204 --> 00:02:20,573 I wanna discover, along with you, 46 00:02:20,573 --> 00:02:23,743 how Earth's complex climate is changing. 47 00:02:23,743 --> 00:02:27,514 In the next hour, we are going to explore the role JPL has, 48 00:02:27,514 --> 00:02:30,517 and is today playing, as part of NASA's larger effort 49 00:02:30,517 --> 00:02:33,920 to understand what's happening to our atmosphere. 50 00:02:33,920 --> 00:02:36,189 But to begin, let's start our journey 51 00:02:36,189 --> 00:02:38,591 by visiting the planet known as Earth's twin. 52 00:02:39,959 --> 00:02:43,296 (deep thoughtful music) 53 00:02:51,871 --> 00:02:56,109 - [Control Room] Five, four, three, two, one, zero. 54 00:02:58,478 --> 00:03:00,547 Ignition. (rocked engine whooshing) 55 00:03:00,547 --> 00:03:01,381 Lift off. 56 00:03:03,016 --> 00:03:07,220 - [Narrator] The year is 1962 and we're on our way to Venus 57 00:03:07,220 --> 00:03:10,356 on board JPL's Mariner 2 spacecraft. 58 00:03:10,356 --> 00:03:13,860 (futuristic music) 59 00:03:13,860 --> 00:03:16,429 Venus was the first planet chosen to explore 60 00:03:16,429 --> 00:03:17,964 for a very practical reason. 61 00:03:18,965 --> 00:03:20,833 It is our nearest planetary neighbor. 62 00:03:22,235 --> 00:03:26,172 And that proximity offered the best chance for success 63 00:03:26,172 --> 00:03:28,041 in the early days of the space age. 64 00:03:29,342 --> 00:03:32,312 (futuristic music) 65 00:03:32,312 --> 00:03:35,515 Still Mariner 2 barely made it there. 66 00:03:39,719 --> 00:03:42,622 (futuristic music) 67 00:03:45,391 --> 00:03:48,595 At the time of the mission, JPL produced this film, 68 00:03:48,595 --> 00:03:51,130 which explored how Venus had once been thought of 69 00:03:51,130 --> 00:03:54,133 as Earth's twin, given its similar size, 70 00:03:54,133 --> 00:03:56,469 density and cloudy atmosphere. 71 00:03:56,469 --> 00:03:59,172 - [Film Narrator] Where does the story start? 72 00:03:59,172 --> 00:04:02,442 Historically, I suppose, it began more than 100 years ago 73 00:04:02,442 --> 00:04:04,677 when man first viewed the clouds of Venus. 74 00:04:05,612 --> 00:04:09,315 Because of the thick clouds it seemed logical to suppose- 75 00:04:09,315 --> 00:04:11,584 - [Narrator] There had even been speculation 76 00:04:11,584 --> 00:04:12,852 that beneath the planet's clouds, 77 00:04:12,852 --> 00:04:15,321 there might exist a tropical world of jungles, 78 00:04:15,321 --> 00:04:17,290 swamps and rainforests. 79 00:04:18,358 --> 00:04:20,660 But by the time of Mariner 2, 80 00:04:20,660 --> 00:04:23,296 a radically different view of Venus was emerging 81 00:04:23,296 --> 00:04:26,065 due in part to the research of a young scientist 82 00:04:26,065 --> 00:04:29,902 who was beginning to make a name for himself, Carl Sagan. 83 00:04:30,870 --> 00:04:33,006 - Many theories of the Venus environment 84 00:04:33,006 --> 00:04:34,774 have been suggested. 85 00:04:34,774 --> 00:04:36,409 However, new information eliminates 86 00:04:36,409 --> 00:04:38,778 at least some of these theories. 87 00:04:38,778 --> 00:04:40,747 Measurements with radio telescopes show 88 00:04:41,581 --> 00:04:43,750 that there is a region on Venus where temperatures 89 00:04:43,750 --> 00:04:45,952 are greater than 600 degrees Fahrenheit. 90 00:04:47,153 --> 00:04:50,123 It is just possible that the hot region exists 91 00:04:50,123 --> 00:04:51,791 at a high altitude. 92 00:04:51,791 --> 00:04:54,694 However, it is more likely that the hot region 93 00:04:54,694 --> 00:04:56,996 is the surface, heated either by an enormous 94 00:04:56,996 --> 00:05:00,266 greenhouse effect or by wind friction. 95 00:05:00,266 --> 00:05:02,201 Therefore, if there is life on Venus, 96 00:05:02,201 --> 00:05:04,971 it is probably of a type that we cannot now imagine. 97 00:05:05,805 --> 00:05:08,708 - [Film Narrator] Tantalizing, exasperating Venus, 98 00:05:08,708 --> 00:05:11,477 a single significant experiment can confirm 99 00:05:11,477 --> 00:05:14,113 old, or create new theories. 100 00:05:15,682 --> 00:05:17,216 - [Narrator] Mariner 2 and the missions 101 00:05:17,216 --> 00:05:19,319 that followed did just that, 102 00:05:19,319 --> 00:05:22,388 turning Venus into the poster child for global warming. 103 00:05:25,758 --> 00:05:29,028 Earth's twin? More like Earth's evil twin. 104 00:05:31,864 --> 00:05:34,267 That label was further reinforced 105 00:05:34,267 --> 00:05:38,004 when JPL's Magellan spacecraft used radar to penetrate 106 00:05:38,004 --> 00:05:41,874 through the clouds and first saw the surface of Venus, 107 00:05:41,874 --> 00:05:45,712 a tortured land landscape full of ancient volcanoes, 108 00:05:45,712 --> 00:05:48,081 more than any other planet in the solar system. 109 00:05:48,981 --> 00:05:51,217 Some may still be active. 110 00:05:51,217 --> 00:05:54,987 (light dramatic music) 111 00:05:54,987 --> 00:05:56,255 But a billion years ago, 112 00:05:56,255 --> 00:05:58,257 Venus may have had an Earth-like climate 113 00:05:58,257 --> 00:05:59,892 with oceans of water. 114 00:06:01,961 --> 00:06:05,064 Yet, over time, something went catastrophically wrong. 115 00:06:06,733 --> 00:06:09,736 (volcanoes exploding) 116 00:06:09,736 --> 00:06:13,072 Volcanoes may have played a role in creating this hellscape 117 00:06:13,072 --> 00:06:18,010 that is today's Venus, but the primary cause may be 118 00:06:18,010 --> 00:06:23,015 the result of the sun's solar wind, charged particles 119 00:06:23,015 --> 00:06:25,385 that are constantly streaming off our star. 120 00:06:26,753 --> 00:06:29,722 The effect of this endless bombardment of radiation, 121 00:06:29,722 --> 00:06:34,727 weakened Venus' magnetic field, making it unstable, 122 00:06:34,861 --> 00:06:37,130 and leaving the planet to fend for itself. 123 00:06:39,866 --> 00:06:42,969 It may be as simple as Venus wasn't able to handle 124 00:06:42,969 --> 00:06:43,803 all this heat. 125 00:06:47,240 --> 00:06:50,276 As temperatures rose the oceans evaporated 126 00:06:50,276 --> 00:06:51,978 turning into water vapor. 127 00:06:53,146 --> 00:06:56,349 Then carbon dioxide also built up in the atmosphere 128 00:06:56,349 --> 00:06:59,018 resulting in a runaway greenhouse effect. 129 00:07:01,421 --> 00:07:03,823 - With Venus being a little bit closer to the sun 130 00:07:03,823 --> 00:07:06,859 basically meant that it never really had a chance. 131 00:07:06,859 --> 00:07:10,496 So over time that carbon dioxide and water vapor built up, 132 00:07:10,496 --> 00:07:13,433 it was impossible for any water to stay on the surface 133 00:07:13,433 --> 00:07:16,002 as a liquid, it all stayed in the atmosphere. 134 00:07:16,002 --> 00:07:19,138 That produced a massive greenhouse atmosphere 135 00:07:19,138 --> 00:07:21,307 that produced a tremendous amount of warming, 136 00:07:21,307 --> 00:07:24,410 probably warming even greater than what we're seeing today 137 00:07:24,410 --> 00:07:27,246 with surface temperatures around 950 Fahrenheit. 138 00:07:31,451 --> 00:07:34,420 - [Narrator] Our next closest planetary neighbor is Mars. 139 00:07:36,689 --> 00:07:38,691 Like Venus, the red planet 140 00:07:38,691 --> 00:07:40,560 shares similar features with Earth. 141 00:07:41,627 --> 00:07:45,264 Mars has polar caps, seasons, and a rotational rate 142 00:07:45,264 --> 00:07:47,133 nearly identical to our planet. 143 00:07:48,167 --> 00:07:52,004 But any hopes that Mars might have been more earthlike 144 00:07:52,004 --> 00:07:55,575 were squashed after the first fly-by of the planet 145 00:07:55,575 --> 00:07:57,243 by JPL's Mariner 4. 146 00:07:59,946 --> 00:08:03,182 A handful of grainy black and white images from the mission 147 00:08:03,182 --> 00:08:06,752 was all that was needed to see that Mars is a barren world. 148 00:08:10,423 --> 00:08:14,160 Just like Venus, scientists believe that ancient Mars 149 00:08:14,160 --> 00:08:15,895 was more like today's Earth, 150 00:08:17,897 --> 00:08:21,634 it was warmer and wetter, wet enough to have had oceans. 151 00:08:22,902 --> 00:08:26,572 But about 4 billion years ago, Mars lost its magnetic field 152 00:08:26,572 --> 00:08:28,474 that served as a planetary shield. 153 00:08:29,876 --> 00:08:32,478 And without the shield, the Martian atmosphere was, 154 00:08:32,478 --> 00:08:36,182 like Venus, left at the mercy of the sun's solar wind. 155 00:08:37,383 --> 00:08:40,520 (light dramatic music) 156 00:08:40,520 --> 00:08:43,789 - And as it cooled, the interior froze up. 157 00:08:43,789 --> 00:08:46,626 And when that happened, the dynamo that generated 158 00:08:46,626 --> 00:08:49,395 its magnetic field froze up as well, 159 00:08:49,395 --> 00:08:51,397 and that was the end of it for Mars. 160 00:08:53,966 --> 00:08:56,435 - [Narrator] It took about 500 million years, 161 00:08:56,435 --> 00:08:58,304 but eventually the solar wind 162 00:08:58,304 --> 00:09:00,006 shredded the Martian atmosphere. 163 00:09:01,207 --> 00:09:04,544 And as it disappeared, the exposed oceans evaporated 164 00:09:06,479 --> 00:09:09,181 and the planet cooled down into the frozen world 165 00:09:09,181 --> 00:09:10,816 it is today. 166 00:09:10,816 --> 00:09:13,586 (daunting music) 167 00:09:20,092 --> 00:09:22,762 (forlorn music) 168 00:09:26,766 --> 00:09:29,735 - So long ago, Mars and Venus were not just 169 00:09:29,735 --> 00:09:32,939 our nearest neighbors, they were our close cousins. 170 00:09:32,939 --> 00:09:35,074 Today, Mars is in deep freeze 171 00:09:35,074 --> 00:09:38,544 and Venus is a furnace, sobering examples of how a planet 172 00:09:38,544 --> 00:09:40,880 might flip from paradise to hell. 173 00:09:43,549 --> 00:09:45,985 - [Narrator] Are we just lucky that Earth resides 174 00:09:45,985 --> 00:09:49,789 in a Goldilocks zone, where it's not too hot, not too cold, 175 00:09:49,789 --> 00:09:51,624 but just right? 176 00:09:51,624 --> 00:09:53,659 That's part of the explanation, 177 00:09:54,827 --> 00:09:57,597 but there's also the delicate and intricate balance 178 00:09:57,597 --> 00:10:00,433 of interactions taking place throughout our planet's 179 00:10:00,433 --> 00:10:04,070 system of water, ice, land, atmosphere, 180 00:10:04,070 --> 00:10:05,438 and all living things. 181 00:10:07,273 --> 00:10:10,276 The more we learn about these interactions, 182 00:10:10,276 --> 00:10:12,044 the more we are understanding 183 00:10:12,044 --> 00:10:14,413 how fragile the Earth is to change. 184 00:10:16,115 --> 00:10:18,351 - Our planet is warming 185 00:10:18,351 --> 00:10:21,420 And the major causes of that are greenhouse gases 186 00:10:21,420 --> 00:10:24,423 like carbon dioxide, or CO2 for short. 187 00:10:25,992 --> 00:10:29,061 Carbon dioxide is a chemical compound comprised of 188 00:10:29,061 --> 00:10:31,764 one part carbon and two parts oxygen. 189 00:10:31,764 --> 00:10:33,866 The oxygen, not a problem. 190 00:10:33,866 --> 00:10:36,268 The carbon, everywhere you look you're going find it, 191 00:10:36,268 --> 00:10:38,504 it's the basic building block of life. 192 00:10:38,504 --> 00:10:41,474 It's in the animals, the fish, the plant, the trees, 193 00:10:41,474 --> 00:10:42,808 and in me and you. 194 00:10:46,379 --> 00:10:48,814 - [Narrator] Nature has an elegant but simple way 195 00:10:48,814 --> 00:10:49,982 of using carbon. 196 00:10:51,217 --> 00:10:54,820 It travels from the atmosphere into organisms in the Earth, 197 00:10:56,255 --> 00:10:59,492 and then back into the atmosphere over and over again. 198 00:11:01,794 --> 00:11:04,764 This process is called the carbon cycle. 199 00:11:09,168 --> 00:11:12,271 It has helped to keep our climate in balance for at least 200 00:11:12,271 --> 00:11:15,241 the last 100,000 years, if not millions. 201 00:11:18,778 --> 00:11:20,479 As part of this cycle, 202 00:11:20,479 --> 00:11:24,283 carbon from decaying organisms can end up in the ground 203 00:11:24,283 --> 00:11:28,921 where it can be transformed into coal, oil and natural gas. 204 00:11:28,921 --> 00:11:31,657 (train horn blowing) 205 00:11:31,657 --> 00:11:34,393 Which we started using as fuels to power machines 206 00:11:34,393 --> 00:11:35,995 over 200 years ago, 207 00:11:37,630 --> 00:11:40,366 and that changed the natural order of things 208 00:11:40,366 --> 00:11:44,403 as more and more carbon in the form of CO2 is ending up 209 00:11:44,403 --> 00:11:47,840 in the atmosphere where it soaks up and re-emits heat. 210 00:11:54,714 --> 00:11:58,751 Have you ever wondered why carbon dioxide and other gases 211 00:11:58,751 --> 00:12:01,120 are called greenhouse gases? 212 00:12:01,120 --> 00:12:02,755 It's an analogy, of course, 213 00:12:03,756 --> 00:12:06,192 a greenhouse works by letting in light, 214 00:12:06,192 --> 00:12:09,729 which heats up objects inside a structure like this, 215 00:12:09,729 --> 00:12:10,963 keeping plants warm. 216 00:12:11,964 --> 00:12:14,200 - But if light can get in through this glass, 217 00:12:14,200 --> 00:12:16,802 why can't the heat escape back out? 218 00:12:16,802 --> 00:12:20,806 The answer is that light and heat are not the same. 219 00:12:20,806 --> 00:12:23,476 The light that we see coming off the sun is just a sliver 220 00:12:23,476 --> 00:12:25,444 of the electromagnetic spectrum, 221 00:12:25,444 --> 00:12:28,080 energy that ranges from very long wavelength 222 00:12:28,080 --> 00:12:32,218 like radio waves, to shorter wavelengths like X-rays. 223 00:12:32,218 --> 00:12:34,720 The wavelength that we can pick up with our eyes 224 00:12:34,720 --> 00:12:37,256 is a relatively shorter wavelength of radiation 225 00:12:37,256 --> 00:12:39,158 that can penetrate through this glass. 226 00:12:40,593 --> 00:12:44,230 - [Narrator] Heat in the form of infrared radiation 227 00:12:44,230 --> 00:12:46,699 has longer wavelengths and it can't travel 228 00:12:46,699 --> 00:12:48,601 through the glass as easily. 229 00:12:48,601 --> 00:12:51,137 The result, the greenhouse warms up. 230 00:12:52,571 --> 00:12:55,641 - CO2 in the atmosphere works in a similar way. 231 00:12:55,641 --> 00:12:58,344 It slows the heat escaping out into space, 232 00:12:58,344 --> 00:13:00,546 and the result, the Earth warms up. 233 00:13:01,413 --> 00:13:05,050 Across the globe, humans output about 40 billion tons 234 00:13:05,050 --> 00:13:08,287 of CO2 into the atmosphere every year. 235 00:13:08,287 --> 00:13:10,556 But let's turn that number into something more 236 00:13:10,556 --> 00:13:11,390 down to Earth. 237 00:13:12,424 --> 00:13:14,260 (car engine whirring) 238 00:13:14,260 --> 00:13:16,128 - [Narrator] Let's say the average car 239 00:13:16,128 --> 00:13:18,430 weighs about two tons. 240 00:13:18,430 --> 00:13:23,369 So we, the world, by burning fossil fuels in various ways 241 00:13:23,369 --> 00:13:27,006 are putting the equivalent mass of 20 billion cars 242 00:13:27,006 --> 00:13:29,308 into the atmosphere every year 243 00:13:31,243 --> 00:13:33,612 and the lifetime of CO2 in the atmosphere, 244 00:13:33,612 --> 00:13:34,780 hundreds of years, 245 00:13:38,117 --> 00:13:40,419 With nearly every passing year, 246 00:13:40,419 --> 00:13:42,555 the level of CO2 is rising. 247 00:13:43,622 --> 00:13:47,393 In 1950, the record for the highest amount of CO2 248 00:13:47,393 --> 00:13:51,397 that had stood for 800,000 years was shattered. 249 00:13:52,598 --> 00:13:55,367 Since then the spike has soared, 250 00:13:56,569 --> 00:13:59,205 and now the Earth is heating up at the fastest rate 251 00:13:59,205 --> 00:14:02,141 of any known time in the history of our planet. 252 00:14:03,142 --> 00:14:05,511 The last time CO2 was this high 253 00:14:05,511 --> 00:14:08,047 was nearly 4 million years ago, 254 00:14:09,114 --> 00:14:13,018 a time when sea level was 78 feet higher than today, 255 00:14:13,018 --> 00:14:16,055 and the Arctic was covered with forests. 256 00:14:16,055 --> 00:14:18,791 (dramatic music) 257 00:14:22,928 --> 00:14:26,031 (light upbeat music) 258 00:14:29,768 --> 00:14:32,705 The importance of CO2 and other greenhouse gases 259 00:14:32,705 --> 00:14:35,507 was not lost on scientists at JPL. 260 00:14:37,443 --> 00:14:39,378 One of them was Moustafa Chahine, 261 00:14:40,512 --> 00:14:42,915 a native of Lebanon who moved to the United States 262 00:14:42,915 --> 00:14:44,049 to attend college. 263 00:14:46,552 --> 00:14:50,856 In 1958 while pursuing his PhD at UC Berkeley, 264 00:14:50,856 --> 00:14:54,593 he saw on the news, the iconic image of JPL's Explorer 1 265 00:14:54,593 --> 00:14:55,794 being held aloft. 266 00:14:57,496 --> 00:15:00,466 That moment inspired him to pursue a space career, 267 00:15:00,466 --> 00:15:02,067 which took him to JPL. 268 00:15:06,005 --> 00:15:08,173 Mus, as everyone called him, 269 00:15:08,173 --> 00:15:10,743 was non assuming as he was brilliant. 270 00:15:11,844 --> 00:15:14,680 He served as JPL's chief scientist, 271 00:15:14,680 --> 00:15:18,083 and it was largely his idea to create an organization 272 00:15:18,083 --> 00:15:19,285 to harbor and nurture 273 00:15:19,285 --> 00:15:21,487 the lab's growing number of scientists. 274 00:15:22,755 --> 00:15:24,590 - [Announcer] For outstanding performance and leadership 275 00:15:24,590 --> 00:15:28,327 in developing the JPL Earth and Space Sciences Division 276 00:15:28,327 --> 00:15:31,397 and enhancing the science programs of JPL and NASA. 277 00:15:32,531 --> 00:15:35,634 (audience clapping) 278 00:15:38,771 --> 00:15:42,675 - [Narrator] Muse's motto was, "Always make progress." 279 00:15:42,675 --> 00:15:45,878 And for three decades Mous was fixated on finding a way 280 00:15:45,878 --> 00:15:49,148 to study Earth's atmosphere from the vantage of space. 281 00:15:50,849 --> 00:15:52,117 - A value of satellite data 282 00:15:52,117 --> 00:15:54,687 is that it gives you global coverage. 283 00:15:54,687 --> 00:15:59,124 Now we can get global coverage with the same accuracy 284 00:15:59,124 --> 00:16:00,492 as balloon-borne instrument. 285 00:16:03,262 --> 00:16:04,096 - [Narrator] Mouse's ambition 286 00:16:04,096 --> 00:16:06,098 was to build a science instrument that would help 287 00:16:06,098 --> 00:16:07,733 to understand climate change. 288 00:16:08,701 --> 00:16:11,203 But that proved to be a hard sell politically. 289 00:16:12,438 --> 00:16:16,041 So he stressed how the same instrument could also be used 290 00:16:16,041 --> 00:16:17,943 to improve weather forecasting. 291 00:16:19,244 --> 00:16:22,781 - The mission is to understand the relationship 292 00:16:22,781 --> 00:16:24,683 between weather and climate. 293 00:16:24,683 --> 00:16:27,720 For example, are the weather anomalies, 294 00:16:27,720 --> 00:16:31,056 which we are seeing today, hurricanes, et cetera, 295 00:16:31,056 --> 00:16:33,025 are they related to climate change? 296 00:16:38,564 --> 00:16:41,166 - [Narrator] And for that idea he found takers. 297 00:16:42,267 --> 00:16:45,904 Mous's instrument called the Atmospheric Infrared Sounder, 298 00:16:45,904 --> 00:16:50,042 or AIRS, was one of six science instruments 299 00:16:50,042 --> 00:16:53,612 that won a spot to fly aboard NASA's Aqua satellite. 300 00:16:53,612 --> 00:16:57,516 - [Control Room] Four, three, two, one. 301 00:16:57,516 --> 00:17:02,521 (spectators cheering) (engines firing) 302 00:17:14,733 --> 00:17:17,403 - [Narrator] AIRS was designed to detect infrared energy 303 00:17:17,403 --> 00:17:20,839 over a range of more than 2,000 wavelength bands. 304 00:17:22,174 --> 00:17:24,510 And from those bands it was hoped, 305 00:17:24,510 --> 00:17:27,046 for AIRS was officially an experiment, 306 00:17:28,180 --> 00:17:30,749 that it would be possible to create 3D maps 307 00:17:30,749 --> 00:17:33,185 of atmospheric temperatures and water vapor. 308 00:17:34,186 --> 00:17:37,322 But before any of these measurements could be put to work 309 00:17:37,322 --> 00:17:39,658 all of the raw data of zeros and ones 310 00:17:39,658 --> 00:17:42,494 first had to be calibrated and validated. 311 00:17:44,730 --> 00:17:47,099 - Once you have those numbers that you think represent 312 00:17:47,099 --> 00:17:50,736 reality, you have to confirm that they are reality. 313 00:17:50,736 --> 00:17:53,105 This is one thing I did for the first five or so years 314 00:17:53,105 --> 00:17:55,808 of the mission, pretty much daily, 315 00:17:55,808 --> 00:17:57,443 including a lot of weekends, 316 00:17:57,443 --> 00:17:58,744 just looked at what AIRS said 317 00:17:58,744 --> 00:18:00,946 and what say a weather balloon said. 318 00:18:02,915 --> 00:18:04,516 Or what AIRS said and what an aircraft 319 00:18:04,516 --> 00:18:06,285 that flew underneath AIRS said. 320 00:18:08,587 --> 00:18:11,256 And with several years of hard work, we concluded 321 00:18:11,256 --> 00:18:14,226 we weren't crazy; that the numbers that we reported 322 00:18:14,226 --> 00:18:17,696 from the instrument were actually representative of reality. 323 00:18:18,897 --> 00:18:22,501 - [Narrator] And soon AIRS began delivering on its promise. 324 00:18:22,501 --> 00:18:26,105 Its measurements were helping to improve weather forecasts. 325 00:18:27,906 --> 00:18:30,209 - That was said to be enough 326 00:18:30,209 --> 00:18:32,344 to pay for the instrument itself. 327 00:18:32,344 --> 00:18:35,814 So forecast really was a major accomplishment, 328 00:18:35,814 --> 00:18:37,816 but NASA's not a forecast center. 329 00:18:39,585 --> 00:18:43,222 - [Narrator] And Mous always trying to make progress, 330 00:18:43,222 --> 00:18:46,692 next, wanted to explore how AIRS might be put to use 331 00:18:46,692 --> 00:18:49,027 to better understand climate change. 332 00:18:53,899 --> 00:18:57,002 (light upbeat music) 333 00:18:59,238 --> 00:19:01,440 - As part of AIRS original purpose 334 00:19:01,440 --> 00:19:03,709 of improving weather forecasting, 335 00:19:03,709 --> 00:19:06,411 the instrument had already gathered a wealth of data 336 00:19:06,411 --> 00:19:10,048 about water vapor, which is H2O in the form 337 00:19:10,048 --> 00:19:11,783 of an invisible gas. 338 00:19:11,783 --> 00:19:13,285 We know it best as humidity. 339 00:19:15,120 --> 00:19:17,089 (light futuristic music) 340 00:19:17,089 --> 00:19:20,092 - [Narrator] Water vapor is also a greenhouse gas, 341 00:19:21,860 --> 00:19:22,995 and there's more water vapor 342 00:19:22,995 --> 00:19:25,564 than all other greenhouse gases combined. 343 00:19:26,532 --> 00:19:29,935 But through the ages, the warmth provided by water vapor 344 00:19:29,935 --> 00:19:31,436 has been a good thing. 345 00:19:31,436 --> 00:19:34,773 Without it our planet would be just a frozen ice cube. 346 00:19:36,875 --> 00:19:40,512 Water vapor is part of nature's normal recycling of water 347 00:19:40,512 --> 00:19:44,917 from the Earth's surface into the atmosphere 348 00:19:44,917 --> 00:19:46,919 and then back again to the surface, 349 00:19:48,387 --> 00:19:51,423 And this recycling goes on constantly, 350 00:19:51,423 --> 00:19:53,125 but on different time scales. 351 00:19:55,027 --> 00:19:58,030 A piece of ice in the Arctic can remain a solid 352 00:19:58,030 --> 00:19:59,598 for millions of years. 353 00:20:00,899 --> 00:20:03,869 A drop of water in the ocean, thousands of years. 354 00:20:05,637 --> 00:20:08,574 That same drop of water in the form of water vapor 355 00:20:08,574 --> 00:20:12,244 in the atmosphere, on average, just nine days. 356 00:20:14,079 --> 00:20:16,448 The amount of water vapor in the atmosphere 357 00:20:16,448 --> 00:20:19,184 is directly related to temperature: 358 00:20:19,184 --> 00:20:22,487 the warmer it is the more water evaporates, 359 00:20:22,487 --> 00:20:23,822 becoming water vapor. 360 00:20:25,023 --> 00:20:28,894 And more water vapor results in warmer temperatures. 361 00:20:31,430 --> 00:20:32,831 - So you've got your cycle. 362 00:20:34,533 --> 00:20:39,504 When you change the state of water from vapor to liquid, 363 00:20:40,472 --> 00:20:44,109 this change releases enormous amount of energy 364 00:20:44,109 --> 00:20:45,244 into the atmosphere. 365 00:20:47,946 --> 00:20:49,848 The understanding it is critical 366 00:20:49,848 --> 00:20:51,750 to understanding our climate change. 367 00:20:52,884 --> 00:20:54,853 This is why it is important. 368 00:21:00,759 --> 00:21:01,893 - [Narrator] At any one time, 369 00:21:01,893 --> 00:21:06,131 the atmosphere contains over 37 million billion gallons 370 00:21:06,131 --> 00:21:08,500 of water vapor, which contains 371 00:21:08,500 --> 00:21:10,168 an astonishing amount of energy. 372 00:21:13,005 --> 00:21:16,775 And all this water vapor doesn't disappear into thin air. 373 00:21:16,775 --> 00:21:21,780 It is constantly transforming back into water, ice and snow, 374 00:21:22,814 --> 00:21:24,316 which rains down on us. 375 00:21:26,885 --> 00:21:28,720 (water whooshing) 376 00:21:28,720 --> 00:21:31,923 Often in the form of storms that are becoming more frequent 377 00:21:32,891 --> 00:21:34,026 and more severe. 378 00:21:38,563 --> 00:21:42,801 But water vapor is not the driver of global warming. 379 00:21:42,801 --> 00:21:46,204 The main catalyst is carbon dioxide, CO2. 380 00:21:48,674 --> 00:21:51,243 And Mous wanted to tease out of the AIRS data, 381 00:21:51,243 --> 00:21:54,680 the signature of CO2 and other greenhouse gases, 382 00:21:54,680 --> 00:21:56,982 which he nicknamed, The Culprit. 383 00:21:58,684 --> 00:22:00,652 But detecting CO2 from the data 384 00:22:00,652 --> 00:22:03,722 proved an enormously difficult task, 385 00:22:03,722 --> 00:22:07,292 what his team liken to unscrambling a scrambled egg. 386 00:22:09,728 --> 00:22:13,632 - So the problem here is looking at a set of data 387 00:22:13,632 --> 00:22:15,934 with the information you want, 388 00:22:15,934 --> 00:22:19,738 but the noise is so high that what you are looking for 389 00:22:19,738 --> 00:22:21,073 is within the noise; 390 00:22:22,708 --> 00:22:25,377 the unscrambling of a scrambled egg. 391 00:22:26,611 --> 00:22:30,982 That difficulty was thought of as insurmountable. 392 00:22:35,387 --> 00:22:38,423 - [Narrator] But just four years after the launch of AIRS, 393 00:22:38,423 --> 00:22:40,726 the insurmountable was surmounted. 394 00:22:41,993 --> 00:22:46,365 The Culprit, Mous declared, had been coaxed out of hiding. 395 00:22:46,365 --> 00:22:48,967 - We've done it, now we are looking at climate. 396 00:22:50,702 --> 00:22:52,871 - [Narrator] This is the first global map showing 397 00:22:52,871 --> 00:22:55,640 the distribution of carbon dioxide around the world 398 00:22:55,640 --> 00:22:57,008 as seen from Earth orbit. 399 00:22:58,343 --> 00:23:02,214 It clearly shows a distinct pattern of high carbon dioxide 400 00:23:02,214 --> 00:23:03,915 in the Northern Hemisphere, 401 00:23:03,915 --> 00:23:05,684 which was consistent with predictions 402 00:23:05,684 --> 00:23:07,185 made by climate modelers. 403 00:23:10,422 --> 00:23:14,659 Methane, another greenhouse gas, is seen here 404 00:23:14,659 --> 00:23:15,494 having a global 405 00:23:15,494 --> 00:23:18,830 distribution similar to that of CO2. 406 00:23:20,799 --> 00:23:24,603 Here, carbon monoxide, which is not a greenhouse gas 407 00:23:24,603 --> 00:23:27,439 can be seen being created by the burning of forests 408 00:23:27,439 --> 00:23:28,407 in the Amazon. 409 00:23:29,841 --> 00:23:32,577 The gas then makes its way across the Atlantic. 410 00:23:33,412 --> 00:23:35,947 Fires in Africa can also be seen. 411 00:23:38,650 --> 00:23:41,386 This animation is composed of nearly six years 412 00:23:41,386 --> 00:23:44,289 of AIRS's first observations. 413 00:23:44,289 --> 00:23:46,992 The overlaying of the up and down curves 414 00:23:46,992 --> 00:23:49,795 are CO2 measurements made from the ground 415 00:23:49,795 --> 00:23:51,763 that correspond to the seasons. 416 00:23:52,697 --> 00:23:55,200 It is a way of showing how the Earth breathes. 417 00:23:56,034 --> 00:23:59,204 Note, the steady March of CO2 upwards. 418 00:24:00,939 --> 00:24:03,074 The map continues to be updated, 419 00:24:03,074 --> 00:24:06,244 all showing a constant increase of CO2. 420 00:24:10,916 --> 00:24:14,119 20 years after being launched, the AIRS instrument 421 00:24:14,119 --> 00:24:17,289 onboard NASA's Aqua satellite is still operating 422 00:24:18,490 --> 00:24:21,593 eying from Earth orbit, not only greenhouse gases, 423 00:24:21,593 --> 00:24:26,598 but hurricanes, dust storms, wildfires, volcanoes, 424 00:24:28,667 --> 00:24:31,136 and, of course, helping weather forecasts. 425 00:24:32,871 --> 00:24:34,706 It was a kind of progress Mous 426 00:24:34,706 --> 00:24:36,508 had always hoped to accomplish. 427 00:24:42,314 --> 00:24:47,319 - It is like having worked for an idea. 428 00:24:47,819 --> 00:24:51,923 And I had doubts, my colleagues had doubt, 429 00:24:51,923 --> 00:24:55,527 but 30 years later, the idea works, 430 00:24:55,527 --> 00:24:59,998 and this is the great sense of happiness, 431 00:24:59,998 --> 00:25:05,003 of satisfaction I get and my colleagues get out of the AIRS, 432 00:25:05,570 --> 00:25:10,575 that a concept that we worked on for 30 years worked, 433 00:25:11,643 --> 00:25:14,045 and worked very well. 434 00:25:14,045 --> 00:25:15,213 This is great. 435 00:25:16,314 --> 00:25:19,217 (thoughtful music) 436 00:25:28,894 --> 00:25:31,997 (light upbeat music) 437 00:25:36,468 --> 00:25:38,670 - [Narrator] The pioneering success of AIRS 438 00:25:38,670 --> 00:25:42,207 helped to create a pathway for CO2 hunters that followed. 439 00:25:43,275 --> 00:25:46,611 Here at JPL, a handful of scientists plotted out 440 00:25:46,611 --> 00:25:51,283 a new mission, the Orbiting Carbon Observatory or OCO. 441 00:25:53,218 --> 00:25:56,588 It was envisioned as an instrument to fly on a spacecraft 442 00:25:56,588 --> 00:25:59,658 devoted solely to measuring carbon dioxide. 443 00:25:59,658 --> 00:26:02,727 (light upbeat music) 444 00:26:05,497 --> 00:26:08,466 - The goal was to learn where CO2 was being created, 445 00:26:08,466 --> 00:26:09,901 what are known as sources, 446 00:26:09,901 --> 00:26:12,837 and where it was being absorbed, sinks. 447 00:26:12,837 --> 00:26:15,740 It was already understood that half of the CO2 448 00:26:15,740 --> 00:26:18,176 was being absorbed into the atmosphere, 449 00:26:18,176 --> 00:26:21,012 leaving the other half going into sinks in the oceans, 450 00:26:21,012 --> 00:26:23,415 forests and the land. 451 00:26:23,415 --> 00:26:26,451 Exactly where and how much were unknown, 452 00:26:26,451 --> 00:26:29,154 but OCO intended to find the answers, 453 00:26:29,154 --> 00:26:31,089 adding a new dimension of data on top 454 00:26:31,089 --> 00:26:32,457 of what AIRS was providing. 455 00:26:33,892 --> 00:26:37,762 - AIRS measures CO2 at high altitudes in the atmosphere, 456 00:26:37,762 --> 00:26:40,165 about halfway between where we're sitting on the ground here 457 00:26:40,165 --> 00:26:41,733 and where airplanes fly. 458 00:26:41,733 --> 00:26:45,270 And so it was a useful measurement for studying the impact 459 00:26:45,270 --> 00:26:47,439 of carbon dioxide on greenhouse effects, 460 00:26:47,439 --> 00:26:50,675 but it wasn't useful for actually tracking the sources 461 00:26:50,675 --> 00:26:53,044 that were emitting carbon dioxide into the air 462 00:26:53,044 --> 00:26:56,381 and the natural sinks that are absorbing it at the surface. 463 00:26:56,381 --> 00:26:58,883 For that we needed to use reflected sunlight 464 00:26:58,883 --> 00:27:01,419 rather than thermal energy to make this measurement, 465 00:27:01,419 --> 00:27:04,089 and we can essentially count all the molecules from the top 466 00:27:04,089 --> 00:27:06,524 of the atmosphere down to the surface and back to space. 467 00:27:06,524 --> 00:27:08,293 That measurement's much, much better 468 00:27:08,293 --> 00:27:11,296 for tracking CO2 sources and sinks. 469 00:27:11,296 --> 00:27:13,732 (light upbeat music) 470 00:27:13,732 --> 00:27:15,667 - [Narrator] In 2002, the mission 471 00:27:15,667 --> 00:27:17,469 was given the go ahead by NASA. 472 00:27:18,303 --> 00:27:21,272 By then scientists everywhere were realizing that 473 00:27:21,272 --> 00:27:24,209 climate change wasn't something far off in the future, 474 00:27:25,543 --> 00:27:27,779 it was going to impact their children's lives 475 00:27:27,779 --> 00:27:31,483 if not their own, which made the work of the OCO team 476 00:27:31,483 --> 00:27:32,517 even more urgent. 477 00:27:33,952 --> 00:27:37,155 - The original Orbiting Carbon Observatory mission 478 00:27:37,155 --> 00:27:40,191 was a long, difficult project. 479 00:27:41,359 --> 00:27:46,364 It took nine years of effort, 1,000 work years, 480 00:27:47,932 --> 00:27:51,302 a lot of trials and tribulations to get to the launch site. 481 00:27:54,406 --> 00:27:59,411 So on February 24th, 2009, we were finally there. 482 00:28:00,679 --> 00:28:03,748 (anticipatory music) 483 00:28:06,551 --> 00:28:08,319 - [Control Room] Step 130, verify (indistinct). 484 00:28:11,823 --> 00:28:13,491 Copy, check 130 complete. 485 00:28:13,491 --> 00:28:15,727 Check, 131 RCSE, send range data, 486 00:28:15,727 --> 00:28:17,595 solar signal and verify. 487 00:28:17,595 --> 00:28:21,132 - It was indeed a beautiful evening. 488 00:28:21,132 --> 00:28:24,269 You can clearly see the stars in the sky. 489 00:28:24,269 --> 00:28:26,337 There was very little wind. 490 00:28:26,337 --> 00:28:28,106 So it was a perfect night. 491 00:28:28,106 --> 00:28:30,175 The air was just filled with excitement. 492 00:28:30,175 --> 00:28:32,444 - [Control Room] RCSE step 132. 493 00:28:33,278 --> 00:28:35,780 - So we went through the manuals and made 494 00:28:35,780 --> 00:28:37,649 of all our final checks. 495 00:28:37,649 --> 00:28:40,919 And I gave the go ahead saying that, 496 00:28:40,919 --> 00:28:42,353 yeah, OCO is ready to launch. 497 00:28:43,488 --> 00:28:46,357 I remember the countdown being given, you know. 498 00:28:46,357 --> 00:28:48,359 10, 9, 8- 499 00:28:48,359 --> 00:28:52,030 - [Control Room] Seven, six, five, four, 500 00:28:52,030 --> 00:28:56,434 three, two, one, zero. - Three, two, one. 501 00:28:56,434 --> 00:29:01,139 - [Control Room] And lift off of the Taurus rocket with OCO 502 00:29:01,139 --> 00:29:04,409 tracking a greenhouse gas in seek of clues 503 00:29:04,409 --> 00:29:05,410 to global warming. 504 00:29:06,945 --> 00:29:09,547 - [Ralph] All of your senses are heightened, 505 00:29:09,547 --> 00:29:11,750 your emotions are running on overdrive. 506 00:29:11,750 --> 00:29:13,618 All of those years work 507 00:29:13,618 --> 00:29:17,055 is finally leading up to this culmination. 508 00:29:17,055 --> 00:29:18,823 We could hear the rumbling, you know, 509 00:29:18,823 --> 00:29:20,391 inside of the control room. 510 00:29:22,861 --> 00:29:25,396 We're not just glued to our chairs, 511 00:29:25,396 --> 00:29:27,332 but also glued to the monitors. 512 00:29:27,332 --> 00:29:30,535 - [Rick] Zero TVA initialized, pressure nominal. 513 00:29:30,535 --> 00:29:34,672 Stage one ignition in approximately five seconds. 514 00:29:34,672 --> 00:29:36,107 - [Ralph] It was a beautiful launch. 515 00:29:36,107 --> 00:29:38,143 - [Rick] Vent cover jettison, 516 00:29:38,143 --> 00:29:39,911 stage zero burnout, stage one ignition, 517 00:29:39,911 --> 00:29:41,146 stage zero separation, 518 00:29:42,113 --> 00:29:44,182 vehicle altitude nominal, power bus is nominal. 519 00:29:44,182 --> 00:29:47,118 Stage one burn will last approximately 70 seconds. 520 00:29:47,118 --> 00:29:49,487 - [Ralph] You couldn't have asked for anything better. 521 00:29:50,421 --> 00:29:52,423 - Because the sky was so clear 522 00:29:52,423 --> 00:29:54,893 we could actually see the rocket go all the way 523 00:29:54,893 --> 00:29:58,863 to the horizon, just with our naked eyes, 524 00:29:58,863 --> 00:30:01,032 and we got some beautiful pictures of that. 525 00:30:02,634 --> 00:30:06,671 Everything went perfectly up until 526 00:30:06,671 --> 00:30:09,474 3 minutes and 50 seconds after the launch. 527 00:30:10,508 --> 00:30:12,610 - [Rick] Fairing separation, 528 00:30:12,610 --> 00:30:13,545 vehicle altitude nominal 529 00:30:13,545 --> 00:30:15,914 following jettison and payload fairing, 530 00:30:15,914 --> 00:30:17,081 proper load shedding. 531 00:30:17,081 --> 00:30:19,717 - We were listening intently on our headsets 532 00:30:21,452 --> 00:30:23,621 and then I heard some chatter. 533 00:30:25,023 --> 00:30:26,291 - [Rick] Approximately 130 miles. 534 00:30:26,291 --> 00:30:27,992 Vehicle is, what's that? 535 00:30:36,467 --> 00:30:39,771 - But I was also looking at the screen and the animation 536 00:30:39,771 --> 00:30:42,207 was still showing everything was fine, 537 00:30:43,408 --> 00:30:44,642 but my eyes were telling me one thing, 538 00:30:44,642 --> 00:30:46,778 but I was hearing something different. 539 00:30:46,778 --> 00:30:50,114 (rocket engines firing) 540 00:30:51,182 --> 00:30:54,986 - I was in the control center, standing at the screen, 541 00:30:54,986 --> 00:30:56,821 watching the numbers go by. 542 00:30:56,821 --> 00:30:58,323 And I knew that to make orbit, 543 00:30:58,323 --> 00:31:00,358 I had to go seven kilometers per second 544 00:31:01,759 --> 00:31:04,262 And every calculation I could do in my mind 545 00:31:04,262 --> 00:31:06,030 at two o'clock in the morning was telling me 546 00:31:06,030 --> 00:31:07,799 those numbers weren't adding up. 547 00:31:07,799 --> 00:31:12,103 So I turned around to the main engineer for the rocket 548 00:31:12,103 --> 00:31:16,875 and I kind of went like this and he goes, "I'm sorry." 549 00:31:18,409 --> 00:31:20,245 - [Rick] You know on that, 550 00:31:20,245 --> 00:31:23,047 it appears we've had a contingency with the OCO mission. 551 00:31:24,616 --> 00:31:26,384 Please enact the emission mishap 552 00:31:26,384 --> 00:31:28,553 preparedness and contingency plan. 553 00:31:28,553 --> 00:31:30,455 Begin with notification data empowerment 554 00:31:30,455 --> 00:31:32,624 and mishap response tasks. 555 00:31:32,624 --> 00:31:33,758 Do not leave your station. 556 00:31:33,758 --> 00:31:36,561 Do not attempt to call out and release information to anyone 557 00:31:36,561 --> 00:31:38,930 or speculate on the cause of the contingency. 558 00:31:40,632 --> 00:31:42,166 - [Ralph] It was devastating. 559 00:31:43,234 --> 00:31:45,770 Everything seemed so surreal. 560 00:31:45,770 --> 00:31:49,173 We kept looking at this plume from the second stage 561 00:31:49,173 --> 00:31:50,775 and we're hearing all this chatter 562 00:31:50,775 --> 00:31:54,178 on the engineering net and it just didn't make sense. 563 00:31:55,113 --> 00:31:59,918 It was just this sense of disbelief and shock. 564 00:32:00,885 --> 00:32:05,857 (daunting music) (rocket firing) 565 00:32:30,581 --> 00:32:33,751 - NASA's Orbiting Carbon Observatory satellite 566 00:32:33,751 --> 00:32:38,756 failed to reach orbit after its 1:55 and 31 second 567 00:32:38,990 --> 00:32:41,159 launch time lift off from Vandenberg- 568 00:32:41,159 --> 00:32:42,593 - [Narrator] It only took a few hours 569 00:32:42,593 --> 00:32:44,329 to determine what had happened. 570 00:32:44,329 --> 00:32:47,465 - Preliminary indications are that the fairing 571 00:32:47,465 --> 00:32:50,735 on the Taurus XL launch vehicle failed to separate. 572 00:32:50,735 --> 00:32:53,104 The fairing is a clamshell structure 573 00:32:53,104 --> 00:32:55,206 that encapsulates the satellite as it travels 574 00:32:55,206 --> 00:32:56,341 through the atmosphere. 575 00:32:59,911 --> 00:33:02,380 - The fairing, the pointy end on the rocket 576 00:33:02,380 --> 00:33:04,282 was supposed to open up. 577 00:33:04,282 --> 00:33:05,416 That didn't happen. 578 00:33:05,416 --> 00:33:08,119 The mechanism that was supposed to open 579 00:33:08,119 --> 00:33:10,855 the fairing failed, malfunctioned. 580 00:33:11,723 --> 00:33:13,725 And so the fairing stayed on the rocket. 581 00:33:15,927 --> 00:33:17,495 - [Narrator] Instead of reaching orbit, 582 00:33:17,495 --> 00:33:20,832 the spacecraft still encased in the fairing, 583 00:33:20,832 --> 00:33:23,868 reentered the atmosphere and fell back to Earth. 584 00:33:26,404 --> 00:33:30,575 - You, it was like losing somebody you've loved, you know, 585 00:33:30,575 --> 00:33:33,544 it was that emotional for all of us. 586 00:33:35,013 --> 00:33:38,583 But I would say 24 hours later, 587 00:33:38,583 --> 00:33:42,787 you know, those emotions turned into a resolve. 588 00:33:47,925 --> 00:33:50,862 - [Narrator] But along with resolve to re-fly the mission 589 00:33:50,862 --> 00:33:52,296 required new funding. 590 00:33:57,535 --> 00:34:02,540 - This was not an easy time to try 591 00:34:02,540 --> 00:34:05,710 to go back and re-fly a mission that you had just lost. 592 00:34:06,577 --> 00:34:10,314 We had just dropped a quarter of a billion dollars 593 00:34:10,314 --> 00:34:11,449 in the Indian Ocean. 594 00:34:13,251 --> 00:34:17,288 We were gonna go to Congress, the White House and say, 595 00:34:17,288 --> 00:34:19,957 "Can I have some more money to do it again?" 596 00:34:20,792 --> 00:34:22,960 This is hard to do at any time, 597 00:34:22,960 --> 00:34:27,832 but it was especially hard to do in February of 2009 598 00:34:28,933 --> 00:34:33,071 because we were in the depth of the greatest recession 599 00:34:33,071 --> 00:34:34,572 since the Great Depression. 600 00:34:38,676 --> 00:34:41,112 - [Narrator] It took a year to get the NASA funds 601 00:34:41,112 --> 00:34:44,682 to rebuild the mission, which was named OCO-2. 602 00:34:45,917 --> 00:34:47,985 But the funding ended up being delayed, 603 00:34:49,020 --> 00:34:52,056 keeping the team intact while marking time 604 00:34:52,056 --> 00:34:53,424 became a new challenge. 605 00:34:54,692 --> 00:34:56,494 - [Rick] Seven, six- 606 00:34:56,494 --> 00:34:57,462 - [Narrator] Then NASA suffered 607 00:34:57,462 --> 00:34:59,664 the loss of another spacecraft, 608 00:34:59,664 --> 00:35:02,300 the Goddard Space Flight Center's Glory mission, 609 00:35:02,300 --> 00:35:06,237 like OCO, was launched from the same launch site 610 00:35:06,237 --> 00:35:08,106 on the same type of rocket. 611 00:35:08,106 --> 00:35:09,941 - [Control Room] We were at T plus 300 seconds. 612 00:35:09,941 --> 00:35:13,611 The vehicle speed air is indicating under performance. 613 00:35:13,611 --> 00:35:16,380 - [Narrator] And met the same fate for the same reason. 614 00:35:17,849 --> 00:35:19,250 - [Control Room] Which is expected 615 00:35:19,250 --> 00:35:22,520 due to a fairing not separating. 616 00:35:22,520 --> 00:35:25,223 - [Narrator] The loss of Glory caused further delays 617 00:35:25,223 --> 00:35:26,491 for the launch of OCO-2. 618 00:35:27,592 --> 00:35:30,528 - [Control Room] Do not leave your stations until released. 619 00:35:30,528 --> 00:35:34,031 Do not attempt to call out and release information to anyone 620 00:35:34,031 --> 00:35:35,500 or speculate on the cause- 621 00:35:35,500 --> 00:35:38,336 - [Narrator] Years passed before the cause of the Glory 622 00:35:38,336 --> 00:35:41,739 and OCO fairing failures was tracked down. 623 00:35:41,739 --> 00:35:45,409 But in 2019, the U.S. Department of Justice 624 00:35:45,409 --> 00:35:48,880 announced that a manufacturer whose materials had been used 625 00:35:48,880 --> 00:35:51,415 in the fairing release mechanism had agreed to a fine 626 00:35:51,415 --> 00:35:56,420 of $46 million to resolve criminal charges and civil claims 627 00:35:56,787 --> 00:35:59,724 related to falsifying test certifications. 628 00:36:01,225 --> 00:36:03,961 (daunting music) 629 00:36:08,499 --> 00:36:11,602 (anticipatory music) 630 00:36:28,953 --> 00:36:33,024 Five years after the loss of the first OCO spacecraft, 631 00:36:33,024 --> 00:36:35,526 the second Orbiting Carbon Observatory 632 00:36:35,526 --> 00:36:37,094 was sitting on the launchpad. 633 00:36:39,897 --> 00:36:42,600 - [Control Room] At T minus 1 hour 38 minutes eight seconds 634 00:36:42,600 --> 00:36:45,369 and counting, this is Delta Launch Control. 635 00:36:45,369 --> 00:36:49,874 - We knew we had built an OCO-2 that was gonna work, 636 00:36:49,874 --> 00:36:52,076 and I felt a lot of excitement. 637 00:36:52,076 --> 00:36:54,111 It was a beautiful launch, 638 00:36:54,111 --> 00:36:56,113 but it was a one that we didn't see. 639 00:36:58,082 --> 00:37:00,518 - [Narrator] On this night, Vandenberg Air Force Base 640 00:37:00,518 --> 00:37:03,921 was fogged in, not that anyone had really cared, 641 00:37:03,921 --> 00:37:06,490 for OCO-2 would be treated to a perfect ride. 642 00:37:06,490 --> 00:37:08,593 - [Control Room] Two, engine start. 643 00:37:08,593 --> 00:37:09,827 One, zero 644 00:37:09,827 --> 00:37:13,931 Lift off of the Delta II rocket with OCO-2 645 00:37:13,931 --> 00:37:17,835 tracking of greenhouse gas, seek of clues to climate change. 646 00:37:21,539 --> 00:37:24,041 - So I remember one of my colleagues saying, 647 00:37:24,041 --> 00:37:28,145 "Hey, wow, that was one of the best launches I never saw." 648 00:37:29,313 --> 00:37:31,515 - [Control Room] Good chamber pressure in the three solids, 649 00:37:31,515 --> 00:37:36,087 good symmetrical burn, 22 seconds in, still looking good. 650 00:37:38,422 --> 00:37:40,524 Good chamber pressure on the second stage. 651 00:37:43,561 --> 00:37:46,264 Standing by for fairing jettison. 652 00:37:46,264 --> 00:37:49,166 (futuristic music) 653 00:37:51,469 --> 00:37:53,504 And we have fairing jettison. 654 00:37:54,872 --> 00:37:57,875 (futuristic music) 655 00:38:03,481 --> 00:38:07,852 Standing by for SECO-1 standing by. 656 00:38:11,255 --> 00:38:12,423 And we have SECO. 657 00:38:15,893 --> 00:38:18,562 - I mentioned to a lot of you that we wanted an opportunity 658 00:38:18,562 --> 00:38:20,698 to finally complete some unfinished business, you know, 659 00:38:20,698 --> 00:38:23,134 with the loss of the original OCO mission, 660 00:38:23,134 --> 00:38:26,304 and we've taken the first step in that direction. 661 00:38:27,571 --> 00:38:31,008 Solar rays did deploy and we are power positive. 662 00:38:37,248 --> 00:38:40,051 - [Narrator] And now OCO-2 was circling the Earth 663 00:38:40,051 --> 00:38:42,687 14 1/2 times every day, 664 00:38:45,489 --> 00:38:48,959 and completing a full mapping of the Earth every 16 days 665 00:38:51,295 --> 00:38:53,297 making millions of individual measurements 666 00:38:53,297 --> 00:38:56,400 that now had to be translated into usable data. 667 00:38:58,369 --> 00:39:01,706 But OCO-2's challenges were not over. 668 00:39:01,706 --> 00:39:04,175 After calibrating the instrument, 669 00:39:04,175 --> 00:39:06,043 scientists thought something was wrong. 670 00:39:09,413 --> 00:39:11,282 - There was a problem when we recognized 671 00:39:11,282 --> 00:39:14,085 that the light signals of glint data over the ocean 672 00:39:14,085 --> 00:39:16,587 were not nearly what we thought they should be. 673 00:39:16,587 --> 00:39:19,123 On the land that data was looking really good, 674 00:39:20,358 --> 00:39:21,959 but when you look over the ocean, 675 00:39:21,959 --> 00:39:25,196 you're looking at where the bright sunglint is. 676 00:39:25,196 --> 00:39:27,264 We were starting to analyze that data, 677 00:39:27,264 --> 00:39:28,799 the retrievals weren't looking good, 678 00:39:28,799 --> 00:39:31,836 and then one of our guys had plotted this as a function 679 00:39:31,836 --> 00:39:34,238 of the angle of the sun, and he said, 680 00:39:34,238 --> 00:39:36,640 "There's a certain pattern I expect I'm gonna see 681 00:39:36,640 --> 00:39:38,809 "and I'm not seeing that pattern. 682 00:39:38,809 --> 00:39:40,945 "I know this idea is kind of crazy, 683 00:39:40,945 --> 00:39:44,382 "but this data sorta looks to me like you're measuring 684 00:39:44,382 --> 00:39:47,852 "with the wrong sensitivity to polarization." 685 00:39:47,852 --> 00:39:50,154 And just to clarify what polarization is, 686 00:39:50,154 --> 00:39:52,823 we probably all have a pair of sunglasses, 687 00:39:52,823 --> 00:39:54,825 and if you have polarized sunglasses, 688 00:39:54,825 --> 00:39:57,695 when you look at a piece of water, right, it doesn't, 689 00:39:57,695 --> 00:39:59,663 it's not super glary. 690 00:39:59,663 --> 00:40:02,066 And if you turn your sunglasses 90 degrees 691 00:40:02,066 --> 00:40:04,935 you would actually see the glary light again. 692 00:40:04,935 --> 00:40:07,972 So it's very different at this 90 degrees off, 693 00:40:07,972 --> 00:40:10,541 especially over water reflections. 694 00:40:10,541 --> 00:40:13,544 So he's like, "I think we've got our sunglasses on sideways. 695 00:40:13,544 --> 00:40:15,379 "We're looking at the wrong polarization." 696 00:40:15,379 --> 00:40:18,115 And we're like, "Are you serious, Chris?" 697 00:40:18,115 --> 00:40:19,617 We're both like, "Are you serious?" 698 00:40:19,617 --> 00:40:22,153 And we're like, "uh-oh." 699 00:40:23,454 --> 00:40:27,124 (light upbeat music) 700 00:40:27,124 --> 00:40:29,894 - [Narrator] The problem was traced back to an error 701 00:40:29,894 --> 00:40:32,396 in the design of the science instrument, 702 00:40:32,396 --> 00:40:36,000 a flaw that could not be fixed with spacecraft in orbit. 703 00:40:36,967 --> 00:40:40,271 - This is where the engineering team again saved our bacon, 704 00:40:40,271 --> 00:40:42,072 and they found that, in fact, 705 00:40:42,072 --> 00:40:46,944 we could just fly our spacecraft a little bit angled. 706 00:40:46,944 --> 00:40:49,713 It was not such an angle that the sunlight wasn't enough, 707 00:40:49,713 --> 00:40:51,982 so the solar panel still got enough light, 708 00:40:51,982 --> 00:40:54,852 it wasn't 90 degrees to get that full sensitivity, 709 00:40:54,852 --> 00:40:57,021 but it was 1/3 of the way there 710 00:40:57,021 --> 00:40:59,557 and it actually increased the signal enough. 711 00:41:01,559 --> 00:41:03,527 In the end, right, I can make it all sound like, 712 00:41:03,527 --> 00:41:05,963 "Oh, simple solution, rotate your spacecraft." 713 00:41:05,963 --> 00:41:07,898 There was a lot of angst between, 714 00:41:07,898 --> 00:41:09,867 "I think our sensitivity's different," 715 00:41:09,867 --> 00:41:13,204 and "Here we go with our little rotated spacecraft." 716 00:41:13,204 --> 00:41:14,038 But yeah. 717 00:41:14,038 --> 00:41:16,507 Wow, that was quite a start of a mission. 718 00:41:19,443 --> 00:41:21,412 - [Narrator] Then a new problem arose. 719 00:41:23,214 --> 00:41:26,083 Following the loss of the Glory mission, 720 00:41:26,083 --> 00:41:29,153 OCO-2's launch was delayed for more than a year, 721 00:41:29,153 --> 00:41:32,122 forcing the spacecraft to be put into storage. 722 00:41:32,122 --> 00:41:34,225 And that had unforeseen consequences. 723 00:41:36,260 --> 00:41:40,664 - While we were in storage, unknown to us, the focal planes, 724 00:41:40,664 --> 00:41:43,033 the detectors that detect the light, 725 00:41:43,033 --> 00:41:47,071 the infrared light, were slowly pulling themselves apart. 726 00:41:48,272 --> 00:41:50,774 Because they were at room temperature and they wanted to be 727 00:41:50,774 --> 00:41:52,776 really, really cold, 728 00:41:52,776 --> 00:41:55,613 halfway between room temperature and absolute zero. 729 00:41:55,613 --> 00:41:58,616 And so when we flew the mission, 730 00:41:58,616 --> 00:42:02,186 many of the detector pixels across our infrared 731 00:42:02,186 --> 00:42:04,355 focal planes had gone bad. 732 00:42:05,990 --> 00:42:07,992 So it's just another challenge, 733 00:42:07,992 --> 00:42:09,727 we still had plenty of pixels that worked. 734 00:42:09,727 --> 00:42:12,096 The question is, how do we work around the ones 735 00:42:12,096 --> 00:42:13,564 that went bad? 736 00:42:13,564 --> 00:42:15,699 We calibrated a whole set of data. 737 00:42:15,699 --> 00:42:17,468 We ran it through computers. 738 00:42:17,468 --> 00:42:19,603 It took months and months of processing, 739 00:42:19,603 --> 00:42:22,540 and the products that came out weren't good. 740 00:42:24,475 --> 00:42:26,677 - The scientists were forced to scrub through their data 741 00:42:26,677 --> 00:42:27,845 a second time. 742 00:42:27,845 --> 00:42:30,247 And remember OCO-2 was beaming back 743 00:42:30,247 --> 00:42:32,182 about a million individual measurements, 744 00:42:32,182 --> 00:42:35,553 or soundings as they are called, every single day. 745 00:42:35,553 --> 00:42:38,489 That's 24 soundings a second. 746 00:42:38,489 --> 00:42:41,825 And most of them like those, taken at night over clouds, 747 00:42:41,825 --> 00:42:44,962 and those bad pixels are of no use, 748 00:42:44,962 --> 00:42:46,730 they have to be filtered out. 749 00:42:46,730 --> 00:42:48,165 So by the end of every day, 750 00:42:48,165 --> 00:42:52,369 the team has about 85,000 usable soundings, 751 00:42:52,369 --> 00:42:54,405 yet, even with a really fast computer, 752 00:42:54,405 --> 00:42:58,008 it takes about five minutes of computation time per sounding 753 00:42:58,008 --> 00:42:59,977 to derive any useful information. 754 00:43:01,245 --> 00:43:03,247 And to do this, thousands of computers 755 00:43:03,247 --> 00:43:05,382 have to be lashed together. 756 00:43:05,382 --> 00:43:08,419 And the CO2 that scientists are seeking to find in the data 757 00:43:08,419 --> 00:43:12,256 is absolutely minuscule, about 400 parts per million. 758 00:43:13,357 --> 00:43:17,394 Which means detecting 400 CO2 molecules residing 759 00:43:17,394 --> 00:43:20,364 in the midst of a million other molecules, 760 00:43:20,364 --> 00:43:23,100 it's enough to bring even a supercomputer to its knees. 761 00:43:24,768 --> 00:43:26,637 It all points to the fact that we're now 762 00:43:26,637 --> 00:43:28,172 in a different space age, 763 00:43:28,172 --> 00:43:31,875 coping with these massive data sets is now as much or more 764 00:43:31,875 --> 00:43:34,078 of a challenge as creating the rockets 765 00:43:34,078 --> 00:43:37,047 and science instruments that are now being flown. 766 00:43:37,047 --> 00:43:40,117 And to the dismay of the OCO-2 team, their measurements 767 00:43:40,117 --> 00:43:41,318 still weren't adding up. 768 00:43:43,053 --> 00:43:46,223 - So there was an early version of our OCO-2 data, 769 00:43:46,223 --> 00:43:49,927 that we don't even like to talk about amongst our team. 770 00:43:49,927 --> 00:43:53,430 A math calculation got put in the wrong order, 771 00:43:54,298 --> 00:43:56,333 and the subset of data we were testing with, 772 00:43:56,333 --> 00:43:58,435 this error was not obvious. 773 00:43:58,435 --> 00:44:01,071 But once we gave it to the data processing team 774 00:44:01,071 --> 00:44:03,741 and they started running through a year of data, 775 00:44:03,741 --> 00:44:06,477 you built up a time series and you could really see, 776 00:44:06,477 --> 00:44:09,680 "Oh, something is not right in this data set." 777 00:44:09,680 --> 00:44:11,649 You don't imagine some of these things 778 00:44:11,649 --> 00:44:14,718 that could be happening, and so you've not imagined it, 779 00:44:14,718 --> 00:44:17,121 you didn't test for, it and you didn't see it, 780 00:44:17,121 --> 00:44:17,955 and there you go, 781 00:44:17,955 --> 00:44:19,156 it shows up, and then you're like, 782 00:44:19,156 --> 00:44:21,258 "Oh, completely missed that one." 783 00:44:22,926 --> 00:44:25,596 In hindsight, I've gone through this process 784 00:44:25,596 --> 00:44:28,899 so many times over, I'm like, oh, that's par for the course, 785 00:44:28,899 --> 00:44:32,603 but it was my first time with delivering a big data set 786 00:44:32,603 --> 00:44:34,605 being one of the key responsible members, 787 00:44:34,605 --> 00:44:35,439 and I was just like, 788 00:44:35,439 --> 00:44:37,307 "Holy cow, I can't believe we did that." 789 00:44:40,544 --> 00:44:43,947 - The team, which had been working 24-hour days, 790 00:44:43,947 --> 00:44:46,550 regrouped, came up with a different solution, 791 00:44:46,550 --> 00:44:49,219 and that solution worked extremely well, 792 00:44:49,219 --> 00:44:51,321 and then we were able to reprocess that data 793 00:44:51,321 --> 00:44:55,092 to derive CO2 values that have, basically, led the world 794 00:44:55,092 --> 00:44:56,560 in precision and accuracy. 795 00:44:58,629 --> 00:45:01,432 - [Narrator] But surprises with the OCO's data results, 796 00:45:01,432 --> 00:45:06,170 what scientists called end products kept on coming. 797 00:45:06,170 --> 00:45:09,039 The biggest of them came from mother Earth herself. 798 00:45:09,907 --> 00:45:12,376 - By the spring of 2015, 799 00:45:12,376 --> 00:45:15,979 just as we're starting to get a useful product out of it, 800 00:45:15,979 --> 00:45:18,582 we started realizing the product was not looking 801 00:45:18,582 --> 00:45:20,184 quite like what we expected. 802 00:45:22,119 --> 00:45:24,655 We expected a product that showed us 803 00:45:24,655 --> 00:45:28,859 that tropical rainforest were the lungs of the planet, 804 00:45:28,859 --> 00:45:32,463 then we expected them to be where the CO2 was being pulled 805 00:45:32,463 --> 00:45:35,065 out of the atmosphere by those marvelous trees 806 00:45:35,065 --> 00:45:37,167 and plants all the way across the tropics. 807 00:45:38,068 --> 00:45:39,570 We weren't seeing that. 808 00:45:39,570 --> 00:45:43,207 We saw that the Amazon is actually emitting carbon dioxide 809 00:45:43,207 --> 00:45:45,809 into the air, not absorbing it. 810 00:45:45,809 --> 00:45:49,446 (water whooshing) 811 00:45:49,446 --> 00:45:50,514 - [Narrator] The Amazon, 812 00:45:50,514 --> 00:45:53,050 the largest rainforest in the world, 813 00:45:53,050 --> 00:45:55,919 has been known to be a major absorber of CO2. 814 00:45:57,354 --> 00:46:00,023 So what had caused such a profound shift? 815 00:46:03,026 --> 00:46:06,330 - We thought, "Oh my gosh, biomass burning, fires, 816 00:46:06,330 --> 00:46:08,499 "wildfires are burning in the tropics 817 00:46:08,499 --> 00:46:10,801 "and that's adding carbon dioxide to the air." 818 00:46:12,302 --> 00:46:14,605 And that turned out being a tiny piece 819 00:46:14,605 --> 00:46:16,140 of what was actually happening. 820 00:46:18,075 --> 00:46:21,612 - [Narrator] What else was happening was an intense El Nino, 821 00:46:21,612 --> 00:46:25,149 a climate pattern that causes an unusual warming of waters 822 00:46:25,149 --> 00:46:25,983 in the Pacific. 823 00:46:27,251 --> 00:46:30,087 And this El Nino was also warming the Amazon. 824 00:46:31,221 --> 00:46:34,258 (daunting music) 825 00:46:34,258 --> 00:46:35,459 (upbeat music) 826 00:46:35,459 --> 00:46:37,761 - They had been going through years of drought 827 00:46:38,662 --> 00:46:43,066 and the extra drought and heat associated with the El Nino 828 00:46:43,066 --> 00:46:45,502 just basically shut the trees down: 829 00:46:45,502 --> 00:46:47,571 they stopped photosynthesizing, 830 00:46:47,571 --> 00:46:49,873 they stopped even trying to grow. 831 00:46:49,873 --> 00:46:53,043 And because of that, they stopped absorbing carbon dioxide 832 00:46:53,043 --> 00:46:54,178 like they usually do. 833 00:46:55,212 --> 00:46:56,680 But that was just the Amazon. 834 00:46:58,015 --> 00:47:00,017 In Africa, they had plenty of rain, 835 00:47:01,185 --> 00:47:03,253 but it was incredibly hot, 836 00:47:03,253 --> 00:47:05,756 the hottest temperatures they had seen. 837 00:47:05,756 --> 00:47:07,491 Plants actually absorb 838 00:47:07,491 --> 00:47:09,193 carbon dioxide through photosynthesis, 839 00:47:09,193 --> 00:47:11,995 but they release carbon dioxide through respiration. 840 00:47:11,995 --> 00:47:13,697 And because of the higher temperatures, 841 00:47:13,697 --> 00:47:17,067 the respiration was outstripping the photosynthesis. 842 00:47:18,235 --> 00:47:20,270 Then we had Southeast Asia: 843 00:47:21,138 --> 00:47:25,609 and in Southeast Asia, Indonesia, it was fire. 844 00:47:26,443 --> 00:47:28,345 The fires were burning out of control. 845 00:47:29,980 --> 00:47:32,616 So we got to watch all of this happen with OCO-2 846 00:47:33,483 --> 00:47:37,354 and make detailed measurements of how the land biosphere, 847 00:47:37,354 --> 00:47:39,890 these trees were interacting with the atmosphere. 848 00:47:41,291 --> 00:47:44,061 - [Narrator] With all of these tropical forests emitting 849 00:47:44,061 --> 00:47:46,730 rather than absorbing CO2, 850 00:47:46,730 --> 00:47:49,032 it would seem that the amount of carbon dioxide 851 00:47:49,032 --> 00:47:51,568 in the atmosphere would skyrocket, 852 00:47:51,568 --> 00:47:52,870 but that had not happened. 853 00:47:53,904 --> 00:47:57,574 Instead, for some reason, CO2 was being absorbed 854 00:47:57,574 --> 00:48:00,177 someplace else, but where? 855 00:48:02,012 --> 00:48:04,848 - Well, it turns out that most of it looks like 856 00:48:04,848 --> 00:48:09,152 it's going into Northern Hemisphere forest. 857 00:48:09,152 --> 00:48:11,021 (dramatic music) 858 00:48:11,021 --> 00:48:16,026 So the forest across Europe, across Asia, 859 00:48:16,560 --> 00:48:18,195 across North America. 860 00:48:19,930 --> 00:48:22,099 So we're still tracking that down 861 00:48:22,099 --> 00:48:25,502 because it's not going into those forests uniformly. 862 00:48:25,502 --> 00:48:28,472 Some of those forests are burning down, 863 00:48:28,472 --> 00:48:31,208 you hear about the giant fires across Alaska 864 00:48:31,208 --> 00:48:32,409 or across Siberia. 865 00:48:33,343 --> 00:48:34,645 (fire crackling) 866 00:48:34,645 --> 00:48:36,747 That's emitting carbon dioxide, 867 00:48:36,747 --> 00:48:40,317 but yet the forest around them are growing. 868 00:48:40,317 --> 00:48:42,386 And why are they growing? 869 00:48:42,386 --> 00:48:44,121 Well, climate change. 870 00:48:44,121 --> 00:48:46,223 (birds chirping) 871 00:48:46,223 --> 00:48:49,026 As the climate has become warmer, 872 00:48:49,026 --> 00:48:51,795 the growing seasons have become longer. 873 00:48:51,795 --> 00:48:54,331 The number of trees and the size of the trees 874 00:48:54,331 --> 00:48:55,365 has been increasing. 875 00:48:56,633 --> 00:48:59,636 So a lot of things are happening with climate change 876 00:48:59,636 --> 00:49:01,872 that are changing where the sinks are going. 877 00:49:02,940 --> 00:49:05,876 It could have been that when we originally 878 00:49:05,876 --> 00:49:09,613 wanted to launch OCO, back in 2009, 879 00:49:09,613 --> 00:49:13,483 that the tropical forests actually were absorbing CO2. 880 00:49:14,718 --> 00:49:15,786 They're not now. 881 00:49:17,387 --> 00:49:20,223 (birds squawking) 882 00:49:21,858 --> 00:49:24,428 - [Narrator] Scientists do not know how long 883 00:49:24,428 --> 00:49:27,564 the Northern forests will be able to carry the burden 884 00:49:27,564 --> 00:49:29,066 of absorbing CO2. 885 00:49:32,002 --> 00:49:34,871 But we do know more about the health of forests, 886 00:49:34,871 --> 00:49:36,306 thanks to OCO-2. 887 00:49:37,407 --> 00:49:39,343 That's because scientists have been able 888 00:49:39,343 --> 00:49:42,446 to tease out of the data the fluorescence of plants. 889 00:49:44,081 --> 00:49:47,484 This faint glowing, invisible to the naked eye, 890 00:49:47,484 --> 00:49:50,921 is a natural part of the healthy photosynthesis process. 891 00:49:51,888 --> 00:49:54,791 The kind of energy being emitted can tell us much 892 00:49:54,791 --> 00:49:58,295 about the condition of forests, plants, and even crops. 893 00:49:59,629 --> 00:50:04,101 This bonus science was one reason why a third OCO instrument 894 00:50:04,101 --> 00:50:07,371 was built out of leftover spare parts. 895 00:50:07,371 --> 00:50:10,907 But OCO-3 is not a carbon copy of OCO-2. 896 00:50:12,576 --> 00:50:14,678 Instead of flying on a spacecraft, 897 00:50:14,678 --> 00:50:16,079 it was designed to be installed 898 00:50:16,079 --> 00:50:19,883 on the International Space Station in 2019. 899 00:50:19,883 --> 00:50:23,920 (light dramatic music) 900 00:50:23,920 --> 00:50:25,822 OCO-3 can be thought of as a kind of 901 00:50:25,822 --> 00:50:29,826 point and shoot camera, which gives scientists 902 00:50:29,826 --> 00:50:33,397 more flexibility and zeroing in on areas of interest. 903 00:50:35,232 --> 00:50:38,168 And among those targets are large cities. 904 00:50:40,203 --> 00:50:42,706 Urban areas account for more than 70% 905 00:50:42,706 --> 00:50:45,542 of all greenhouse emissions caused by humans. 906 00:50:47,377 --> 00:50:50,047 These are scenes of Los Angeles, 907 00:50:50,047 --> 00:50:52,883 which has the fifth largest urban carbon footprint 908 00:50:52,883 --> 00:50:53,717 in the world. 909 00:50:55,452 --> 00:50:58,355 It's one of the many urban areas around the globe 910 00:50:58,355 --> 00:51:01,258 that OCO-3 has set its sight on. 911 00:51:01,258 --> 00:51:04,528 (light dramatic music) 912 00:51:05,362 --> 00:51:08,732 With a single pass over the Los Angeles Basin, 913 00:51:08,732 --> 00:51:12,936 OCO-3 can take snapshots that can reveal tiny differences 914 00:51:12,936 --> 00:51:16,106 in levels of CO2 throughout the area. 915 00:51:16,106 --> 00:51:19,242 The highest readings in, yellow on this map, 916 00:51:19,242 --> 00:51:21,711 are on the west side of downtown LA, 917 00:51:21,711 --> 00:51:24,848 a densely populated area with congested freeways 918 00:51:24,848 --> 00:51:26,650 and CO2-emitting industries. 919 00:51:28,318 --> 00:51:31,855 The amount of CO2 being emitted there is about twice 920 00:51:31,855 --> 00:51:33,657 the global average. 921 00:51:33,657 --> 00:51:36,726 (light dramatic music) 922 00:51:36,726 --> 00:51:40,530 - Los Angeles has an ambitious plan to become carbon neutral 923 00:51:40,530 --> 00:51:42,199 by the year 2050. 924 00:51:42,199 --> 00:51:44,367 That will be no easy task. 925 00:51:44,367 --> 00:51:47,471 But having the ability to track CO2 emissions 926 00:51:47,471 --> 00:51:50,273 from the ground, the air and from space 927 00:51:50,273 --> 00:51:53,443 will be crucial in understanding the path forward, 928 00:51:53,443 --> 00:51:56,146 for there's a lot of unfinished business ahead of us. 929 00:51:59,816 --> 00:52:02,252 - [Narrator] We've not touched upon ozone yet, 930 00:52:02,252 --> 00:52:05,288 and here there's an encouraging story from the past 931 00:52:05,288 --> 00:52:07,224 that can help to guide how we choose 932 00:52:07,224 --> 00:52:09,559 to confront climate change in the days ahead. 933 00:52:11,561 --> 00:52:13,864 At the beginning of our journey we saw 934 00:52:13,864 --> 00:52:16,800 that JPL's Explorer 1 mission discovered 935 00:52:16,800 --> 00:52:19,636 the Van Allen radiation belts that protect our planet 936 00:52:19,636 --> 00:52:21,505 from harmful solar radiation. 937 00:52:24,407 --> 00:52:28,512 And it turns out our planet has a second line of defense, 938 00:52:28,512 --> 00:52:31,314 the ozone layer in the upper atmosphere 939 00:52:31,314 --> 00:52:35,285 that acts as a sunscreen, blocking ultraviolet rays 940 00:52:35,285 --> 00:52:37,587 that would otherwise sterilize the Earth 941 00:52:37,587 --> 00:52:39,523 and damage all living things. 942 00:52:42,292 --> 00:52:45,562 But back in 1985, the surprising results 943 00:52:45,562 --> 00:52:48,298 of a British expedition to the Antarctic 944 00:52:48,298 --> 00:52:49,499 landed like a bombshell. 945 00:52:49,499 --> 00:52:51,301 (daunting music) 946 00:52:51,301 --> 00:52:55,071 The discovery of a dramatic drop in the amount of ozone gas 947 00:52:55,071 --> 00:52:58,074 at the Southern Pole, what came to be known as 948 00:52:58,074 --> 00:52:59,876 the ozone hole. 949 00:52:59,876 --> 00:53:02,612 (daunting music) 950 00:53:03,613 --> 00:53:06,550 This discovery raised all kinds of questions. 951 00:53:07,584 --> 00:53:10,287 Was the hole an aberration? 952 00:53:10,287 --> 00:53:12,923 Why was it only at the South Pole? 953 00:53:12,923 --> 00:53:14,057 Was it spreading? 954 00:53:15,692 --> 00:53:17,861 And if so, how long would it be 955 00:53:17,861 --> 00:53:20,463 before the hole reached populated areas? 956 00:53:22,933 --> 00:53:26,002 An urgent concern was knowing what was causing 957 00:53:26,002 --> 00:53:27,971 the ozone depletion. 958 00:53:27,971 --> 00:53:32,876 Theories abounded: might there be a natural explanation 959 00:53:32,876 --> 00:53:34,778 or was it human caused? 960 00:53:38,148 --> 00:53:41,184 The United States rushed a scientific expedition 961 00:53:41,184 --> 00:53:43,486 to the Antarctic the very next year. 962 00:53:46,122 --> 00:53:49,926 The team included JPL scientists who deployed on the ground, 963 00:53:49,926 --> 00:53:52,262 a science instrument originally designed 964 00:53:52,262 --> 00:53:54,564 for high altitude balloon observations. 965 00:53:55,899 --> 00:53:58,635 Their results and those of other measurements 966 00:53:58,635 --> 00:54:01,771 made on the expedition pointed to a human cause 967 00:54:01,771 --> 00:54:04,808 for the hole, a class of chemicals called 968 00:54:04,808 --> 00:54:07,911 chlorofluorocarbons or CFCs, 969 00:54:10,046 --> 00:54:11,982 that were being used in everyday products 970 00:54:11,982 --> 00:54:14,184 like hairsprays and air conditioners. 971 00:54:16,319 --> 00:54:19,022 In the years that followed, many more types 972 00:54:19,022 --> 00:54:21,057 of ozone measurements were made, 973 00:54:21,057 --> 00:54:24,094 many of them by JPL teams who used balloons, 974 00:54:24,094 --> 00:54:27,130 aircraft, satellites and the space shuttle 975 00:54:27,130 --> 00:54:29,266 as platforms for their instruments. 976 00:54:32,369 --> 00:54:35,071 Early on many nations of the world, 977 00:54:35,071 --> 00:54:38,041 alarmed by the news that CFCs were destroying 978 00:54:38,041 --> 00:54:41,911 the ozone layer, quickly agreed to address the problem 979 00:54:41,911 --> 00:54:43,913 by signing the Montreal Protocol. 980 00:54:46,750 --> 00:54:49,586 This international agreement called for reducing 981 00:54:49,586 --> 00:54:53,390 CFC emissions by half and later called for a complete ban. 982 00:54:54,424 --> 00:54:57,427 It is the only U.N. treaty that has ever been ratified 983 00:54:57,427 --> 00:54:59,262 by every country on Earth. 984 00:55:02,065 --> 00:55:04,367 And today the ozone hole is healing. 985 00:55:06,336 --> 00:55:09,806 Based on current projections, a half century from now, 986 00:55:09,806 --> 00:55:11,841 ozone in the atmosphere will return 987 00:55:11,841 --> 00:55:13,410 to healthy levels once again, 988 00:55:16,880 --> 00:55:19,783 - What's being done to tackle ozone is a model, 989 00:55:19,783 --> 00:55:22,552 a roadmap, for addressing the greenhouse gases 990 00:55:22,552 --> 00:55:24,321 that are warming up our planet. 991 00:55:24,321 --> 00:55:27,557 But make no mistake, this will be a much harder 992 00:55:27,557 --> 00:55:30,994 and longer road for the world to travel than ozone. 993 00:55:30,994 --> 00:55:33,463 Remember early on when we met that young scientist 994 00:55:33,463 --> 00:55:36,032 who shared his findings about what greenhouse gases 995 00:55:36,032 --> 00:55:37,867 had done to Venus? 996 00:55:37,867 --> 00:55:42,272 Two decades later, in 1985, Carl Sagan would again address 997 00:55:42,272 --> 00:55:44,341 the impact of greenhouse gases, 998 00:55:44,341 --> 00:55:46,910 but this time it would be about our planet. 999 00:55:48,144 --> 00:55:51,314 His words are as true for us today as they were then. 1000 00:55:55,785 --> 00:55:58,955 - [Carl] We have a kind of handwriting on the wall. 1001 00:55:58,955 --> 00:56:03,893 The power of human beings to affect and control and change 1002 00:56:03,893 --> 00:56:07,130 the environment is growing as our technology grows. 1003 00:56:09,032 --> 00:56:11,968 And at present time, we clearly have reached the stage 1004 00:56:11,968 --> 00:56:16,473 where we are capable, both intentionally and inadvertently, 1005 00:56:16,473 --> 00:56:20,610 to make significant changes in the global climate 1006 00:56:20,610 --> 00:56:22,145 and in the global ecosystem. 1007 00:56:23,580 --> 00:56:27,917 Because the effects occupy more than a human generation, 1008 00:56:27,917 --> 00:56:31,888 there is a tendency to say that they are not our problem. 1009 00:56:33,156 --> 00:56:35,191 Of course, then they're are nobody's problem. 1010 00:56:36,393 --> 00:56:40,563 We are passing on extremely grave problems for our children 1011 00:56:41,598 --> 00:56:43,266 when the time to solve the problems, 1012 00:56:43,266 --> 00:56:45,301 if they can be solved at all, is now. 1013 00:56:49,272 --> 00:56:51,207 It is also a global problem. 1014 00:56:52,175 --> 00:56:56,546 The nations to deal with this problem have to make a change 1015 00:56:56,546 --> 00:57:00,350 from their traditional concern about themselves 1016 00:57:00,350 --> 00:57:02,952 and not about the planet and the species, 1017 00:57:02,952 --> 00:57:05,822 a change from the traditional short term objectives 1018 00:57:05,822 --> 00:57:07,557 to longer term objectives. 1019 00:57:09,292 --> 00:57:11,795 I think that what is essential for this problem 1020 00:57:11,795 --> 00:57:13,396 is a global consciousness, 1021 00:57:14,798 --> 00:57:18,535 a view that transcends our exclusive identifications 1022 00:57:18,535 --> 00:57:20,737 with the generational and political groupings 1023 00:57:20,737 --> 00:57:23,373 into which, by accident, we have been born. 1024 00:57:27,644 --> 00:57:30,280 The solution to these problems requires a perspective 1025 00:57:30,280 --> 00:57:33,316 that embraces the planet and the future 1026 00:57:33,316 --> 00:57:36,653 because we are all in this greenhouse together. 1027 00:57:43,159 --> 00:57:45,829 - We are all on this planet together, 1028 00:57:45,829 --> 00:57:49,399 and the path forward will take all of us working together. 1029 00:57:49,399 --> 00:57:50,700 I'm Mike Meacham. 1030 00:57:50,700 --> 00:57:53,736 Thanks for watching and for taking care of the good Earth.