A NASA instrument designed to provide unprecedented resolution in monitoring major air pollutants (down to four square miles) was launched on April 7. The Tropospheric Emissions: Monitoring of Pollution (TEMPO) instrument will help improve life on Earth by revolutionizing how scientists observe air quality from space. By monitoring the effects of everything from rush-hour traffic to pollution from forest fires and volcanoes, NASA data will improve air quality across North America.
NASA’s TEMPO launched from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. The instrument is a payload on the satellite Intelsat 40E, which separated from the rocket approximately 32 minutes after launch. The signal acquisition occurred at 1:14 a.m. TEMPO commissioning activities will begin in late May or early June.
TEMPO will be the first space-based instrument to measure air quality over North America hourly during the daytime and at spatial regions of several square miles. In the U.S. TEMPO data will play an essential role in the analysis of pollution, the potential for improved air quality alerts, the effects of lightning on ozone, the movement of pollution from forest fires and volcanoes, and even the impact of fertilizer application.
TEMPO’s observations will dramatically improve the scientific data record on air pollution, including ozone, nitrogen oxide, sulfur dioxide, and formaldehyde, over the continental United States and also Canada, Mexico, Cuba, the Bahamas, and part of the island of Hispaniola.
TEMPO also will form part of an air quality satellite virtual constellation to track pollution around the Northern Hemisphere. South Korea’s Geostationary Environment Monitoring Spectrometer, the first instrument in the constellation, was launched into space in 2020 on the Korean Aerospace Research Institute GEO-KOMPSAT-2B satellite and is measuring pollution over Asia. The ESA (European Space Agency) Sentinel-4 satellite, scheduled to launch in 2024, will make measurements over Europe and North Africa.
The instrument was built by Ball Aerospace and integrated onto Intelsat 40E by Maxar.
