On Mardi Gras, and a few hours before tomorrow’s New Moon, NASA will launch its Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO) into space. The launch at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California is scheduled for 1:51:30 am PST.
The Carbon Observatory is a satellite, and it’s NASA’s first that is dedicated solely to measuring the carbon dioxide levels in Earth’s atmosphere. It will monitor increases and decreases, and will try to determine where carbon dioxide in the atmosphere originated.
In the chart for the scheduled launch — it could change depending on technical factors and the weather — the Great Attractor in Sagittarius is rising. As scheduled now, this mission will have far-reaching effects, beyond what we can comprehend now. Pholus is also close to the ascendant; this is the planet that lets the Pepsi out of the shaken-up bottle on a hot day (as we’ve often described it here). This might come back to us not as corn syrup in the face, but as too much information.
The ascendant ruler (Jupiter) and the descendent ruler (Mercury) are conjunct exact to eight arc minutes — a symbol of innovation, and a suggestion that the mission will work very well; but we are not going to like the news. It’s too bad we didn’t have this kind of technology before we dumped all that carbon into the atmosphere. Mars is conjunct Nessus, which is likely to represent how badly we have screwed ourselves over.
And a packed 2nd house always tells you that a lot of money is at stake. We need to bear in mind the extent to which environmental policy is determined by the supposed right of corporations to make as much money as they want.
The reason for the mission, according to Eric Lansen, the Program Executive of the OCO, is to gather more information about global warming. It’s already known how much carbon dioxide is due to human behavior, but “we can only account for about half of the carbon dioxide that doesn’t remain in the atmosphere.”
In the backdrop of the mission is Chiron conjunct Neptune. This is the symbol of The Great Awakening. Whoever stands to lose something may not want the truth to get out, but it would appear that we will find out, no matter what anyone who stands to lose wants to happen.