NASA's TEMPO Mission Could Bring You Hyper-Local Pollution Alerts:
An advanced tool for monitoring air pollution from space is set to launch on Friday morning, and it'll be hosted on a commercial satellite.
A soon-to-launch NASA mission is set to offer more data on North America's air quality than researchers and public health programs have ever had available before. A new monitoring instrument hosted on a commercial satellite will offer continent-wide, hourly updates on air pollution, at about a four square mile resolution, according to the space agency and partner groups behind the project.
The Tropospheric Emissions Monitoring of Pollution (TEMPO) instrument will keep tabs on the air quality in a region stretching from the oil sands in Canada to south of Mexico City, and from the Atlantic to Pacific coasts, according to a NASA news statement.
The device will use advanced imaging to collect detailed light scattering data (i.e. hyperspectral data) on sunlight reflected off of Earth's atmosphere at varying levels. Using this information, scientists back on the ground will be able to translate those wavelengths of light into local concentrations of different pollutants in the air, explained Dennis Nicks, director of payload engineering at Ball Aerospace–the company that NASA contracted to design and build the TEMPO instrument, during a Wednesday press briefing.
TEMPO is not the first spacecraft to look at air quality. NASA and NOAA already have multiple instruments in orbit that gather pollution-related measurements. The difference though, according to multiple NASA-affiliated researchers, is that these other tools are trapped in low Earth orbit, where they're limited. At LEO, other devices like the Ozone Monitoring Instrument on Aura spacecraft and the Orbiting Carbon Observatories can only capture one air quality reading per day per location—and those readings come at a fixed time, which is a big deficiency. Air quality fluctuates a lot throughout the day (just think of the difference in polluting emissions being pumped out during morning rush hour on a major highway versus the early afternoon). Plus, these other devices tend to capture their readings at a lower resolution, about 100 square miles, said Karen St. Germain, head of NASA's Earth Science Division, in the press briefing.
[...] The baseline mission is scheduled to last 20 months following commissioning, but Daugherty noted it could have a much longer lifetime as its host satellite is expected to last for 15 or more years. Plus, TEMPO was built for the long-term, similar to the Korean GEMS instrument which tracks pollution over the Asia-Pacific region and launched in 2020, he added.
Assuming all goes well with this week's launch, the instrument will power up at the end of May or beginning of June and begin its commissioning process after the commercial satellite is set up. NASA expects it to begin transmitting usable data beginning in October, which will be verified and made publicly available starting about April 2024.
The launch was successful, and here is a fact sheet [PDF] for the curious.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 10 2023, @12:40PM (1 child)
Missing from tfs is the important deatil that it will be in geosynchronous orbit. From the top link:
From that viewpoint, I'm assuming it could also image large parts of South America...I wonder why they weren't included?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 10 2023, @05:18PM
I've looked through a number of their presentations and their field of regard only goes down to the Yucatan. Taking a wild guess, I would say that since they are a ride-along mission, they aren't positioned at the ideal location to see the whole globe because that is where the comms antenna would be (since that's its job), so they probably have a blocked field of view.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Monday April 10 2023, @01:57PM
Wonder how NASA got this past all the politicians who dance to the desires of rich polluters? Snuck it past, I suppose, when they weren't paying attention.
The instinct to stick your head in the sand and deny problems is frightfully strong. Industrialists are always on the watch for research which could harm their business by, for instance, confirming that some chemical is very unhealthy. See all the whining over having to phase out lead in plumbing. Hope it doesn't get us all killed some day.
(Score: 2) by MIRV888 on Monday April 10 2023, @05:44PM
I live in the Ohio Valley. We get dead air conditions in the summer that cause some pretty bad air pollution in the city. I'd love better resolution.