Source: Xinhua

02-26-2009 11:11

Special Report:   Tech Max

WASHINGTON, Feb. 25 (Xinhua) -- NASA's Rick Obenschain, deputy director at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, will lead the investigation board for the unsuccessful launch of the Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO), NASA said Wednesday in a statement.

Rick Obenschain (right) presents Stephanie Getty with the prestigious Kerley Award.(File photo)

The Mishap Investigation Board, or MIB, will have four other members. NASA will announce the names of additional members as they become available. The board will gather information, analyze the facts, and identify the failure's cause or causes and contributing factors. The MIB will make recommendations for actions to prevent a similar incident.

The investigation will be key for NASA's Glory satellite, an environment-monitoring spacecraft also designed to aid climate change studies and slated to launch on a Taurus rocket in October.

"Our goal will be to find a root cause of the problem," NASA launch director Chuck Dovale said Tuesday. "We won't fly Glory until we have that data known to us."

The rocket carrying the OCO, designed to study global warming from space, crashed in the ocean near Antarctica after a failed launch early Tuesday.

The OCO spacecraft was NASA's first satellite built exclusively to map carbon dioxide levels on Earth and understand how humanity's contribution of the greenhouse gas was affecting global climate change. The satellite carried a single three-channel spectrometer to make its detailed measurements.

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Editor:Yang Jie