MSNBC reports that today's launch of NASA's Orbiting Carbon Observatory was a failure. I don't feel like talking about it because it makes me sad so I am just going to quote the article:
A shroud designed to protect the spacecraft accidentally doomed its mission.
The glitch occurred just minutes after the $273.4 million spacecraft blasted off at 4:55 a.m. ET atop a Taurus XL rocket launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California....
The 972-pound (441-kilogram) OCO spacecraft was NASA's first satellite built exclusively to map carbon dioxide levels on Earth and understand how humanity's contribution of the greenhouse gas is affecting global climate change. The satellite carried a single three-channel spectrometer to make its detailed measurements and was slated to launch into a near-polar, sun-synchronous orbit that would fly about 438 miles (705 kilometers) above Earth...
The first sign of trouble came about three minutes after liftoff, when the Taurus XL rocket's telemetry showed no sign that it had shed its clamshell-like payload fairing.
The fairing is a nose-mounted shroud that protects the spacecraft inside from atmospheric drag until the booster reaches space. If the fairing had separated, launch controllers would have expected to see the spacecraft and its upper stage accelerate more quickly, since it would have shed the excess weight. But that speed boost never occurred.
"As a direct result of carrying that extra weight, we could not make orbit," Brunschwyler [Taurus project manager for the Dulles, Va.-based rocket manufacturer Orbital Sciences] said, adding that the failure ultimately sent OCO crashing into the ocean near Antarctica. "We're fairly certain that it did not fly over any land and it landed short of Antarctica."
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