NASA has cancelled the Geostationary Carbon Cycle Observatory (GeoCarb), a collaboration with the University of Oklahoma and Lockheed Martin that intended to put a greenhouse gas–monitoring satellite into geostationary orbit. GeoCarb would have measured levels of carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide and methane in the atmosphere about 4 million times per day. The mission was selected by NASA in 2016. “Decisions like this are difficult, but NASA is dedicated to making careful choices,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA’s associate administrator for science. “We look forward to accomplishing our commitment to state-of-theart climate observation in a more efficient and costeffective way.”
The decision to end GeoCarb was due to “technical concerns, cost performance and availability of new alternative data sources.” The most recent anticipated cost of GeoCarb was $600 million (£494 million). As for those new data sources, they include the new Earth Surface Mineral Dust Source Investigation (EMIT) instrument that arrived at the International Space