On July 28, 2026, the Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 (OCO-2) instrument entered safe mode. Instrument recovery was initiated, including a decontamination cycle. After science data collection resumed on August 12, examination of the data revealed a bit shift in the O2 A-band science data packets. An operational workaround was implemented to address the issue, allowing the team to characterize the post-anomaly data. The instrument was deemed to be stable as of August 13 at orbit 64441.
Forward-stream products between August 13 and September 17 (orbits 64441 to 64953) were processed using calibration assumptions based on a limited set of post-anomaly measurements. As a result, a lower-than-nominal fraction of forward-stream retrievals in this date range have a good XCO2 quality flag. Forward-stream products generated from September 17 onwards (starting with orbit 69594) use improved calibration assumptions and exhibit nominal data quality.
Retrospective-stream products will be processed from August 13 onwards and are expected to yield nominal data quality.
There will be a permanent data gap between July 28 and August 13 for the following "Referenced Datasets" listed below.