The GeoCarb Mission: The Next Phoenix Mission

Since selection in 2016, the OU/NASA-led GeoCarb Mission has navigated successfully through numerous challenges towards building the first ever geostationary greenhouse gas observatory. Despite cancelation in November 2022, the flight instrument is being integrated at the Lockheed Martin Advanced Technology Center to be delivered to NASA in Fall 2023 for technical and programmatic assessment prior to development of further plans. The case for geostationary measurements from GeoCarb remains strong in the current landscape of numerous sun synchronous polar orbiting platforms due to their persistent nature with daily revisits and flexible sampling times that will allow more opportunities to see especially cloudy regions such as the tropics.

In this presentation, we will share the major developments in the past year. This will include performance characterization of the spectrometer as well as science algorithm simulations with expected instrument performance and mission ops strategies. The performance of the GeoCarb instrument will be sufficient to constrain natural and anthropogenic surface fluxes from local to continental scales in the Western Hemisphere and be ready to fly after a rigorous calibration and characterization campaign.