SAN FRANCISCO – The first NASA satellite to measure air pollution hourly shows so much promise that space agency officials are already thinking about ways to extend its life.
“We want TEMPO to last for 10 years, if possible,” Barry Lefer, NASA tropospheric composition program manager, said Dec. 12 at the American Geophysical Union annual meeting here. “So, we are going to baby it.”
TEMPO, short for Tropospheric Emissions: Monitoring of Pollution, was sent aloft in April as a hosted payload on Intelsat 40e, a geostationary communications satellite. The instrument, built by Ball Aerospace to measure atmospheric pollution from Canada’s oil sands to the Yucatán Peninsula and from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean, made its first North American scans in early August.
NASA researchers immediately began comparing TEMPO data with airborne measurements of the same locations.
Since August, “the TEMPO team has been busy testing out all different parts of the instrument and optimizing that scan pattern,” Lefer said. “The most exciting thing is it’s working incredibly well.”
NASA Pathfinder
TEMPO is NASA’s first Earth-observation satellite in geostationary orbit. Previous polar-orbiting satellites provided daily observations. In contrast, TEMPO is providing 10 to 12 daily scans.
“It’s the first time to have the range of spectral data from a geostationary satellite,” said Hazem Mahmoud, an Earth scientist from NASA’s Langley Research Center. “We have been working on development of new software capability to handle this very high temporal resolution data.”
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