WaPo, off the mark again:

This summer, NASA will begin keeping an eye on your garden

Certainly they mean the NSA, not NASA, right?

No:

When you’re working in the yard this summer, take a look up: Using a satellite, NASA scientists are paying attention to how healthy your lawn and garden are.

Next month, the agency plans to launch the Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2. Its primary aim is to create a global map of carbon sources and carbon sinks. The OCO-2 mission will provide the most detailed map of photosynthetic fluorescence — that is to say, of how plants glow — ever created. Using this data, scientists should be able to estimate how quickly the world’s plants are absorbing carbon from the atmosphere.

[…]

Um… no, and no.

Here’s the project website:

oco.jpl.nasa.gov

From the measurement page:

[…] To reduce any uncertainties, the OCO-2 instrument will acquire a large number of densely-spaced samples. Each sample will cover an area of about 3 km2 when the instrument is looking straight down (nadir), along the spacecraft’s ground track. The OCO-2 instrument can gather as many as 72,000 soundings on the sunlit side of any orbit. With measurement footprints of this size and density, the OCO-2 instrument will get an adequate number of high quality soundings, even in those regions where clouds, aerosols and topographic variations are present.

Sigh.