The space station finds a call

summary

The International Space Station (ISS) has never been considered a hotbed of science, even though the United States and partner countries have spent more than $ 100 billion to build it. But two decades after it began to take shape, the ISS finally found a call to science by looking at its home planet. The station now houses five instruments that observe the Earth, and two more are expected to join this year. One, the Observatory of Carbon in Orbit 3 (OCO-3) of NASA, was to be launched this week. The ISS is not an ideal platform for such instruments, but its affordable price has helped maintain the diversity of Earth's observations by NASA after several spectacular launch failures a decade ago . OCO-3 will complement the existing OCO-2 satellite, while its flexible scoring system will enable the creation of carbon-scale maps at the city level. These cards could pave the way for verification of carbon reductions in space.