NASA worked for nine years to build the $278 million Orbiting Carbon Observatory, which crashed on Tuesday and fell into the waters near Antarctica. It only took five minutes thus to finish what the biggest space experts had built in nearly a decade.

Climate scientists now work in finding out where are the world’s carbon dioxide resources, which cause the global warming. The Orbiting Carbon Observatory was the satellite especially built to monitor how the carbon dioxide enters and exits the atmosphere of the Earth. The satellite was supposed to send a picture of the things taking place in and out of the ozone layer.

The natural process which creates the CO2 is the one when the forests and the whole nature absorb the greenhouse gas from the atmosphere, while the burning fossil fuels and decaying plant and animal life send more back. The two processes stand in a delicate balance that changes once with the seasons and the temperature. For example, the green plants pull in more carbon dioxide in spring than they do in winter, when many of them lose their leaves and the capacity of absorption.

Scott Denning, a professor at Colorado State University who worked on the NASA project's science team, said that even if the scientists and researchers found the explanation of the process, is still very hard to account for all the carbon dioxide that the humans can produce.

He added that the main idea to be born in mind is that half of the fossil-fuel CO2 between the land and the oceans is taken up but doesn’t go into the air. This is the first thing the scientists need to discover before saying what could happen in the future.