Spaceflight Insider

News Archive / Tagged: Orbiting Carbon Observatory

  • Falsified test results caused two mission launch failures

    Laurel KornfeldMay 2nd, 2019

    Investigators at NASA's Launch Services Program have determined the root cause for two back-to-back launch failures of a Taurus XL rocket in 2009 and 2011.

  • ULA marks 25th anniversary of Delta II rocket

    Jim SharkeyFebruary 16th, 2014

    On Friday, Feb. 14, 2014 United Launch Alliance (ULA) commemorated the 25th  anniversary of the Delta II launch vehicle.  A quarter century earlier, on February 14, 1989, a Delta II lifted off from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, carrying the GPS BII-01 satellite to orbit. While it was designed specifically to accommodate the Block II series of GPS […]

  • Looking in all the wrong places: NASA’s 2014 Earth Science Mission Roundup

    Josh TallisJanuary 26th, 2014

    Perspective is everything in space. Telescopes must have their optics calibrated to an unimaginably minimal tolerance; they must be capable of anticipating and correcting atmospheric distortions; they must sustain tremendous temperature fluctuations in the hostile vacuum of space; and, of course, they must be pointed in the right direction. For most, that direction is invariably […]

  • OCO-2 Observatory Conducts Environmental Tests

    NASADecember 26th, 2013

    NASA’s Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO)-2 spacecraft is moved into a thermal vacuum chamber at Orbital Sciences Corporation’s Satellite Manufacturing Facility in Gilbert, Ariz., for a series of environmental tests. The tests confirmed the integrity of the observatory’s electrical connections and subjected the OCO-2 instrument and spacecraft to the extreme hot, cold and airless environment they […]