Shitstain Wants To Eliminate Funds For 2 "Gold Standard"Satellites Tracking CO2; 1/4 Of 1% Of Proposed NASA Budget Cuts

As Congress returns to session this month, the fate of two satellites that have become integral to climate science hangs in the balance. The Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 and -3, or OCO-2 and -3, have been circling the globe for years, gathering some of the best data available on carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere.

They helped scientists determine that natural systems struggled in the extreme heat of 2023 and failed to pull in as much CO2 as normal. They’ve helped researchers track early indicators of agricultural drought in India, and measure climate-warming emissions coming out of coal power plants in Montana, Poland and Canada.

They are the “gold standard” for measuring the most abundant climate-warming gas in the atmosphere from space, according to NASA. Yet the space administration has proposed ending the satellites’ missions next year, part of the Trump administration’s proposed 24 percent reduction in the agency’s budget. Across NASA, the cuts would amount to $6 billion. Nixing the two satellites would provide $16 million of that, about a quarter of a percent of the total.

“It would be a blow to science to have these missions canceled,” said Ray Nassar, a research scientist at Environment and Climate Change Canada, that country’s environmental regulatory agency, who stressed that he was not commenting on the merits of a U.S. policy proposal but only its potential impact to science. He has used OCO data to show how satellites could measure pollution from individual power plants. Nassar noted that it cost hundreds of millions of dollars to build and launch the satellites, “and the continual operation of them is a fraction of that cost. So to shut them off is … not really getting the full return on the initial investment to get them there.”

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https://insideclimatenews.org/news/08092025/nasa-carbon-dioxide-satellites-trump/