Obama’s first presidential pardon should be to free a political prisoner, held without trial, rhyme nor reason, in solitary confinement in an air conditioned prison box somewhere outside Washington, DC.
The sentence was long-term incarceration by the Bush Administration. The crime was the Administration’s fear of DSCOVR (Deep Space Climate Observatory) being a potential climate change whistle-blower and witness to human crimes against Earth.
We are not reporting on a human prisoner of course, but a real prisoner nonetheless. DSCOVR has been locked away for the last 7 years, with little explanation for why an already paid for and completed US$100 million high-tech spacecraft should be left un-launched, especially when that spacecraft was designed to detect, measure and monitor Earth’s atmosphere, land and oceans for climate change.
The DSCOVR spacecraft was designed to orbit at the L1 Lagrangian point, a gravity-neutral point 937 thousand miles (1.5 million kilometers) from the Earth toward the Sun, from where it could gaze at the entirety of the sunlit side of Earth, 24hours a day, 7 days a week.
The mission had multiple objectives but one was to measure Earth’s absorption and emission of heat energy which is largely driven by cloud cover, snow cover, atmospheric conditions and the Earth’s ambient temperature. All these factors affect the albedo, the heat radiation exchange between Earth, the Sun and deep space. The information is critical to calibrate climate models, the ozone layer and global climate change in general.
Dr. Jonah Colman, a climate modeler at Los Alamos National Laboratory, said in a Seed Magazine interview that "the availability of DSCOVR for inter-comparison between other measurements" would reconcile discrepancies in data from low-Earth orbit satellites. "Albedo is incredibly important," he added. "It can change quickly, and we currently do not have a direct method for measuring it. DSCOVR would have given us that". Other prominent climatologists also spoke out in its favor.
There were some dark moments in DSCOVR’s history, perhaps political intrigue and maybe even some ill-informed engineering decisions, like proposing to launch it from the Space Shuttle instead of an expendable rocket like most other probes that leave Earth’s orbit.
DSCOVR started out under another name, Triana, the Columbus' voyage sailor who first sighted the New World. Al Gore supported the project in 1998 hoping that it would broadcast real-time images of Earth to encourage interest in the environment.
NASA seemed to cancel the project once and for all, in January 2006, even though the Ukraine offered to launch it for free. NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) was interested in having DSCOVR in space to monitor solar activity. The project's future remains uncertain.
From the L1 vantage point, the spacecraft would offer an un-interrupted monitoring of Earth, giving scientific data as well as a visual view of Earth so that we could log in to the internet and gaze in wonder at our beautiful planet but also see the harm we are doing to it, ourselves, and our fellow planet’s inhabitants.
Satellites in geo-synchronous, or low earth orbit, see only the same portion Earth all the time, or mere snap-shots. The geo-synchronous satellites do not have a very good view angle to include the poles either. DSCOVR would truly have given us a global view of our home world, much like the Apollo 8 astronauts did 40 years ago with their famous Earthrise image that has been credited with giving environmentalism a great boost in the 1970s.
It seems the last place this political prisoner was being held, was at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Maryland. Maybe you can help free this political prisoner, by writing to your Senator and Congressional representative and asking for a pardon and a launch to orbit so DSCOVR can complete her mission.
Visit the blog site that has tried to get the story behind DSCOVR unwrapped and into the public forum: www.desmogblog.com/search/node/dscovr
Trevor Williams is a University of Victoria Mechanical Engineering PhD candidate specialising in renewable energy, power grid modelling and plug-in hybrid electric vehicles. He has a bachelors in Aeronautical Engineering, a Masters in Management Science and over 23 years international experience in the space industry, having worked on Earth observation and telecommunications satellites.
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