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Microcarb
What are our planet’s main carbon sinks: tropical rainforests or the oceans? How many tonnes of CO2 are released by the world’s cities, vegetation and the oceans? As surprising as it may seem, we don't know how much CO2 is absorbed and released in certain parts of the world, due to a scarcity of ground-based measuring stations. Nor do we know how these amounts vary with the seasons. Yet this type of information is crucial for understanding the causes and consequences of climate warming, as CO2 is the most important greenhouse gas produced by human activity.
To fill in these gaps in our knowledge, NASA launched the OCO-2 satellite in 2014. In 2021, CNES will take over this role with the launch of MicroCarb. Its dispersive spectrometer instrument will be able to measure atmospheric concentration of CO2 globally with a high degree of precision (on the order of 1 ppm) and with a pixel size of 4.5 km x 9 km.
The instrument will be flown on a microsatellite built around CNES’s Myriade spacecraft bus. This mission involves the French scientific community studying climatology and the carbon cycle. The mission will be funded by the Investments for the Future Programmes.
Mission's news feed
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Small Satellites, Systems and Services Symposium
May 28, 2018
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European space cooperation, CNES and ESRIN meet to discuss Earth-observation programmes
Tuesday 18 July, CNES President Jean-Yves Le Gall met ESA Director of Earth Observation Joseph Aschbacher at ESRIN, the European Space Research INstitute, to discuss the Earth...
July 18, 2017
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Science Programmes Committee Meeting focuses on innovation, climate and exploration
A meeting of CNES’s Science Programmes Committee (CPS) was held at CNES headquarters in Paris on Wednesday, 31 May 2017. The CPS advises the CNES Board of Directors on matters...
May 31, 2017