TEMPO Launch: Monitoring Air Pollution over North America | NASA Earth Science

TEMPO Launch: Monitoring Air Pollution over North America | NASA Earth Science

On Friday, April 7, 2023, NASA's TEMPO instrument launched into space from Cape Canaveral, Florida on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket as part of the Intelsat 40e communications satellite. TEMPO, a joint collaboration between NASA and the Smithsonian, will provide the first-ever hourly scans of air pollution over greater North America. NASA's Tropospheric Emissions: Monitoring of Pollution (TEMPO) instrument will monitor major air pollutants down to four square miles.

From a fixed geostationary orbit above the equator, 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—far better than existing limits of about 100 square miles in the U.S. TEMPO data will play an important role in the scientific analysis of pollution, including studies of rush hour 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 effects of fertilizer applications.

This instrument will measure the spectra required to retrieve ozone (O3), nitrogen dioxide (NO2), sulfur dioxide (SO2), formaldehyde (H2CO), glyoxal (C2H2O2), aerosols, cloud parameters, and UV-B radiation. TEMPO thus measures the major elements, directly or by proxy, of the diurnal tropospheric ozone chemistry cycle. Multi-spectral observations provide sensitivity to ozone in the lowermost troposphere. TEMPO will also quantify the daytime temporal evolution of aerosol loading.

TEMPO will be part of a constellation of instruments measuring air quality over the Northern Hemisphere that will also include the European Space Agency's Sentinel-4, currently in development, and South Korea's Geostationary Environment Monitoring Spectrometer.

Learn more about TEMPO: https://tempo.si.edu/

Video Credit: Harvard & Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics

Duration: 4 minutes, 40 seconds

Release Date: April 25, 2023

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