NASA's TEMPO Mission Could Bring You Hyper-Local Pollution Alerts

upstart writes:

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.

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