Tags: NASA, Satellite Launch, NOAA
Publication: NewsObserver.com
Publication Date: 04/10/2013

DSCOVR satellite. Image credit: Wikimedia Commons

The Obama administration’s Fiscal Year 2014 budget request presented this week included a proposal to pursue an environmental satellite championed by Al Gore. The spacecraft, dubbed GoreSat by cirtics, has been shelved since 2001 after Gore lost the presidential elections.

Now, a dozen years later, Obama wants to invest $35 million from the 2014 budget to refurbish the Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR), its official name, which cost around $100 million by then.

Al Gore first proposed the idea in 1998 as vice president. The satellite was planned to travel 1 million miles out in deep space to a special gravity-balancing area between Earth and the Sun and provide data for climate change measurements.

Since the project got cancelled, the satellite has been at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. It has been refurbished twice in 2009 and 2010 and NASA has invested $3.4 millions to test it this year.

Under Obama’s plan, the U.S. Air Force would pay for the launch scheduled for 2014, and NOAA would be in charge of operating the satellite.

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