The little Canadian satellite that could ... and does

Ottawa Citizen: While NASA lost a $285-million satellite this week, a Canadian microsatellite that does the same job is chugging along happily in orbit -- at one-1,000th the cost. The 30-centimetre-long University of Toronto satellite is searching for "missing" carbon dioxide -- the vast amount of Earth's main greenhouse gas that somehow vanishes each year.

That's what NASA's OCO satellite would have done if it had survived launch on Tuesday. The big difference: Canada built and launched its tiny version for $300,000. The OCO (Orbiting Carbon Observatory) launched Tuesday, but failed to reach orbit.

Meanwhile, the U of T's CanX-2 is cruising 700 kilometres above Earth, "and functioning really well" after some glitches that followed its launch last April, said Ben Quine. He's the director of space engineering at York University, which made an instrument aboard the tiny CanX. Its job, like OCO's, is to find Earth's missing greenhouse gas.

"The measurement principle is almost exactly the same as the one for the OCO," he said. "It's very sad when you lose a spacecraft, but it also means that we are the only people in orbit with one-kilometre resolution on the ground." That means York's Argus instrument can look at small details below. A Japanese satellite does the same job, but can't look at features less than 10 kilometres wide.

"Argus is the lowest-possible-cost approach to making this measurement. NASA was probably the highest-possible-cost approach," he said, "so the instruments are not going to be exactly commensurate." Still, little Argus began sending a stream of data in December.

…The CanX satellite "is about the size of a milk carton," Quine said. It's 34 centimetres long by 15 by 15, and cost about $300,000, including the launch. It weighs 3.5 kilograms -- less than one per cent of OCO's weight. "With these little microsatellites, the launch is about $100,000," he said. Many microsatellites can share the same rocket…

Satellite animation by Wiki-MG**** @@@-fr Accueil fr:Accueil 10:10, 24 January 2007 (UTC), Wikimedia Commons, under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2