TEMPO 

1. Context 

2. Key points

• The Tropospheric Emissions Monitoring of Pollution (TEMPO) instrument will allow scientists to monitor air pollutants and their emissions sources from space more comprehensively than ever before, down to the neighbourhood level.
• This instrument will measure 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".
• The data will be used by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and other agencies responsible for tracking atmospheric pollution.

3. The Speciality of TEMPO

• The TEMPO mission is about more than just studying pollution it's about improving life on Earth for all.
• By monitoring the effects of everything from rush-hour traffic to pollution from forest fires and volcanoes, NASA data will help improve air quality across North America and Protect our planet.
• 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 will be hosted on an Intelsat communications satellite in geostationary orbit.
• Existing pollution-monitoring satellites are in low Earth orbit, which means they can only provide observations once a day at a fixed time.
• TEMPO will be able to measure atmospheric pollution down to a spatial resolution of 4 square miles (10 square kilometres) or neighbourhood level.

4. About Geostationary orbit

• Geostationary orbit is a common orbit for weather satellites and communications satellites, but an air quality instrument measuring gases had not been there yet.
• In a geostationary orbit 22, 236 miles (35, 786 kilometres) above the equator, TEMPO will match the rotation of the Earth, meaning it will stay over the same location in North America at all times.
• The great thing about TEMPO is that for the first time, we will be able to make hourly measurements over North America, so it will be able to see What's happening over the whole day as long as the sun is up.
• TEMPO will have multiple applications from measuring levels of various pollutants to providing air quality forecasts and helping the development of emission-control strategies.

5. Importance of the Mission

• More than 40 per cent of the US population, 137 million people, live in places with unhealthy levels of particle pollution or ozone.
• Air pollution is blamed for some 60, 000 premature deaths a year.
• Among the pollutants tracked by TEMPO will be nitrogen dioxide, produced from the combustion of fossil fuels, formaldehyde and ozone.
• The data will be made available online for members of the public to monitor air quality information in their local area.
• TEMPO will power up at the end of May or in early June and begin producing data in October, although it will not be made available to the public until April 2024.