Space-based NASA instrument to track pollution over North America
A Falcon 9 rocket successfully blasted off from Florida into space on Friday carrying a new NASA device that can track air pollution over North America down to the neighborhood level.
The launch, which took place at 12:30 am (0430 GMT), will bring into orbit the Tropospheric Emissions Monitoring of Pollution (TEMPO) instrument, which will allow scientists to monitor air pollutants and their emission sources more extensively than ever before.
The data will be used by the US Environmental Protection Agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and other agencies responsible for tackling atmospheric pollution.
"TEMPO will be measuring pollution and air quality across greater North America on an hourly basis during the daytime, all the way from Puerto Rico up to the tar sands of Canada," said Kevin Daugherty, NASA's TEMPO project manager.
A unique feature of TEMPO, which is about the size of a washing machine and has been described as a chemistry laboratory in space, is that it will be hosted on an Intelsat communications satellite in geostationary orbit.
"Geostationary orbit is a common orbit for weather satellites and communications satellites, but an air quality instrument measuring gases hadn't been there yet," said Caroline Nowlan, an atmospheric physicist at the Harvard & Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
Existing pollution-monitoring satellites are in low Earth orbit, which means they can only provide observations once a day at a fixed time.
"We can get measurements, say, over New York City at 1:30 in the afternoon," Nowlan said. "But that's just one data point over New York City over a day.
"The great thing about TEMPO is that for the first time we'll be able to make hourly measurements over North America,
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