• The Trump administration has proposed shutting down NASA’s Orbiting Carbon Observatories (OCO) program — a series of dedicated Earth remote sensing satellites designed to measure atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO₂) from space, aiding in the understanding of climate change.
• The first OCO mission, launched in February 2009, failed shortly after liftoff. Its replacement, OCO-2, was successfully launched in July 2014, while a third mission, OCO-3, was deployed to the International Space Station (ISS) in 2019 to enhance CO₂ monitoring capabilities.
• The program’s data has been instrumental in creating high-resolution maps of plant growth, supporting agriculture, rangeland and grazing management, drought monitoring, and forest mapping.
• These insights are widely used by the US Department of Agriculture and private agricultural consulting firms for forecasting crop yields and tracking drought conditions.