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Orbiting Carbon Observatory’s launch failure traced to balky rocket shroud

NASA's Orbiting Carbon Observatory, a new satellite dedicated to mapping Earth's carbon dioxide levels, crashed into the ocean near Antarctica just after launch Tuesday when a shroud designed to protect the spacecraft accidentally doomed its mission.

The glitch occurred just minutes after the $280 million spacecraft blasted off at 4:55 a.m. ET atop a Taurus XL rocket launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.

"Our whole team at a very personal level is disappointed in the events of this morning," John Brunschwyler, the Taurus project manager for the Dulles, Va.-based rocket manufacturer Orbital Sciences, said in a somber post-launch briefing. "It's very hard."

The 972-pound (441-kilogram) 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 is affecting global climate change. The satellite carried a single three-channel spectrometer to make its detailed measurements and was slated to launch into a near-polar, sun-synchronous orbit that would fly about 438 miles (705 kilometers) above Earth.

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