Carbon tracker sat crash 'a blow'

A new satellite to track the chief culprit in global warming has crashed into the ocean near Antarctica after launch, dealing a major setback to Nasa's already weak network for monitoring Earth and its environment from above.

The $280 million (£192 million) mission was designed to answer one of the biggest question marks of global warming: What happens to the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide spewed by the burning of coal, oil and natural gas? How much of it is sucked up and stored by plants, soil and oceans and how much is left to trap heat on Earth to worsen global warming?

"It's definitely a setback. We were already well behind," said Neal Lane, science adviser during former President Bill Clinton's administration. "The programme was weak, and now it's really weak."

For about a decade, scientists have complained of a decline in the study of Earth from space. Nasa spent more money looking at other planets than it did at Earth in 2007. That same year, the National Academy of Sciences warned that Nasa's study of Earth "is at great risk" with fewer missions than before and ageing satellites.

"We have a very weakened Earth-observing system just at a time where we need every bit of data that we could possibly get," said Elisabeth Holland, a senior scientist at the National Centre for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado.

She said Nasa has fallen behind Europe in environmental satellites. Japan successfully launched a carbon dioxide tracking satellite just last month.

The Nasa satellite, called the Orbiting Carbon Observatory, was meant to explain Earth's capture of carbon dioxide, which now appears to be slowing and could accelerate global warming, said Holland, who helped write the 2006 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report.

Minutes after launch in California, the satellite fell back to Earth near Antarctica not far from where environment ministers and scientists met to talk about climate change. Nasa officials said a protective cover on the satellite did not release and fall away, and the extra weight meant the satellite could not reach orbit.

"This was going to be one of the few bright spots in the Earth-observing system for the last five years," Holland said.