Konnichiwa from sunny Tokyo!

As Neil wrote here last week I just moved to Tokyo at the week-end, pretty much at the same time as our first issue going live. Exciting times! This week has been really busy, mainly with flat-hunting, and I’m now looking forward to applying for my official alien card. Actually I was expecting lots of immigration-related forms but so far I’ve been so well looked after that I haven’t had much bureaucracy to deal with (which can only be a good thing seeing as I can only just write my name in Japanese).

I had intended to spend my first week-end here attending the Annual Meeting of the Chemical Society of Japan, but it turns out the vast majority of the talks are in Japanese (I had thought the plenary lectures, or perhaps the CSJ award lectures, would be in English). I know nearly all the attendees are Japanese, and so it is understandable — but on the other hand would the conference not benefit from being accessible to everyone (including those few non-Japanese invited speakers)?

I will be at the English-speaking events: the Asian International Symposium on Sunday afternoon, and the conference dinner… and I shall now also spend some of the week-end looking for these cherry blossoms everyone is talking about!

Anne

Anne Pichon (Associate Editor, Nature Chemistry)

The loss of NASA’s Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO), which last week ended up in the ocean rather than in orbit, is a hard blow not only to the team who devoted much of the last decade to getting it off the ground but to scientific – and especially climate – research.

There is quite literally of sense of grief among the climate research community, evident in the story by Jeff Tollefson and Geoff Brumfiel over on Nature News. My colleague Anna Barnett interviewed David Crisp, OCO Principal Investigator, ahead of the launch. His excitement about the mission was palpable as he spoke of how the NASA satellite would measure atmospheric carbon dioxide at a resolution 3 times higher than any previous space measurement of a trace gas.

The Japanese space agency successfully launched their Greenhouse Gases Observing Satellite (GOSAT) in January and undoubtedly this will provide some of the data that OCO would have collected. But OCO would have provided an unprecedented spatial resolution. Taking half a million carbon dioxide measurements per day, the satellite would have located specific sources of the greenhouse gas, differentiating cities and freeways from adjacent forested areas.

Not only is this a huge loss for exploratory science, the timing of the incident is especially unfortunate. With emissions rising and a global climate deal in the balance, pinpointing the origin and fate of carbon dioxide has never been more urgent — a task that the US$280-million mission would have accomplished skillfully.

So what’s next for NASA? Personally, I think the agency should make every effort towards a rapid re-launch, as I’ve detailed in my latest editorial. Getting an OCO replacement into orbit within the next few years would offer at least a brief period of data verification with GOSAT – one advantage of having two CO2 trackers in space simultaneously – and would have the added advantage of monitoring carbon heavyweights from space during the early stages of a post-2012 global climate deal.

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