Tropospheric Emissions: Monitoring of Pollution
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Tropospheric Emissions: Monitoring of Pollution (TEMPO) is a space-based spectrometer designed to measure air pollution across greater North America at a high resolution and on an hourly basis.[4][5] The ultraviolet–visible spectrometer will provide hourly data on ozone, nitrogen dioxide, and formaldehyde in the atmosphere.[6]
TEMPO attached to a communications satellite. | |
| Operator | NASA |
|---|---|
| Manufacturer | Ball Aerospace |
| Instrument type | UV/Vis spectrometer |
| Function | Atmospheric chemistry and pollution monitoring |
| Began operations | 2023 (planned)[1][2] |
| Website | tempo |
| Properties | |
| Resolution | 0.6 nm |
| Spectral band | 290–740 nm (UV, Vis) |
| Host spacecraft | |
| Spacecraft | Intelsat 40e[3] |
| Operator | Intelsat |
| Launch date | 7 April 2023, 4:30:00 UTC |
| Rocket | Falcon 9 Block 5 B1076.4 |
| Launch site | Cape Canaveral, SLC-40 |
| Orbit | Geostationary, 91° W |
TEMPO is a hosted payload on a commercial geostationary communication satellite with a constant view of North America. TEMPO's spectrometer measures reflected sunlight from the Earth's atmosphere and separates it into 2,000 component wavelengths.[4] It will scan North America from the Pacific Ocean to the Atlantic Ocean and from the Alberta oil sands to Mexico City.[7] TEMPO will form part of a geostationary constellation of pollution-monitoring assets, along with the Sentinel-4 from ESA and Geostationary Environment Monitoring Spectrometer (GEMS) from South Korea's KARI.[8]
On 3 February 2020, Intelsat announced that the Intelsat 40e satellite will host TEMPO. Maxar Technologies, the builder of the satellite, is responsible for payload integration.[9][1][2] The launch occurred on 7 April 2023.[10]
Earth Venture-Instrument program
TEMPO, which is a collaboration between NASA and the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, is NASA's first Earth Venture-Instrument (EVI) mission.[11][12] The EVI program is an element within the Earth System Science Pathfinder (ESSP) program office, which is under NASA's Science Mission Directorate Earth Science Division (SMD/ESD). EVI's are a series of innovative "science-driven, competitively selected, low cost missions". The series of "Venture Class" missions were recommended in the 2007 publication Earth Science and Applications from Space: National Imperatives for the Next Decade and Beyond.[13] "[I]nnovative research and application missions that might address any area of Earth science" are selected through frequent "openly-competed solicitations".[14]
Earth Venture missions are "small-sized competitively selected orbital missions and instrument missions of opportunity" and include NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar (NISAR), Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT), ICESat-2, SAGE III on ISS, Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment Follow On (GRACE-FO), Cyclone Global Navigation Satellite System (CYGNSS), Ecosystem Spaceborne Thermal Radiometer Experiment on Space Station (ECOSTRESS), and the Global Ecosystem Dynamics Investigation lidar (GEDI).[15]