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The Future of Monitoring Air Quality from Space
TEMPO’s measurements from geostationary orbit (GEO) will create a revolutionary dataset that provides understanding and improves prediction of air quality (AQ) and climate forcing.
The KORUS-AQ airborne science experiment taking to the field in South Korea this spring is part of a long-term, international project to take air quality observations from space to the next level and better inform decisions on how to protect the air we breathe.
Before a new generation of satellite sensors settle into orbit, field missions like KORUS-AQ provide opportunities to test and improve the instruments using simulators that measure above and below aircraft, while helping to infer what people breathe at the surface.
These geostationary instruments will make up a northern hemisphere air quality constellation to analyze their respective regions.Credits: Image Courtesy of Andreas Richter (University of Bremen) and Jhoon Kim (Yonsei University)
“We want to move beyond forecasting air pollution, we want to influence strategies to improve it,” said Jim Crawford, a lead scientist at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia. “This is where satellite observations can play an important role.”
Existing low Earth orbit (LEO) instruments have established the benefit of space-based views of air pollution. From space, large areas can be viewed consistently, whereas from the ground only discrete (often single) points can be measured. As Dave Flittner, TEMPO project scientist, explains, a geostationary (GEO) air-quality constellation can accurately track the import and export of air pollution as it is transported by large-scale weather patterns.
TEMPO, or Tropospheric Emissions: Monitoring of Pollution, is one instrument on the road to improving air quality from space. According to Flittner, hardware has recently begun development and TEMPO is on track to be finished no later than fall of 2017, and available for launch on a to be selected commercial communications satellite.
For the first time, TEMPO will make accurate hourly daytime measurements of tropospheric pollutants (specifically ozone, nitrogen dioxide, sulfur dioxide, formaldehyde, and aerosols) with high resolution over the U.S., Canada and Mexico. With help from related international missions, these observations provide a complete picture of pollution sources in the northern hemisphere and how they influence air quality from local to global scales.
These geostationary instruments will make up a northern hemisphere air quality constellation to analyze their respective regions.
Credits: Image Courtesy of Andreas Richter (University of Bremen) and Jhoon Kim (Yonsei University)
About 22,000 miles above the equator, the Korean Aerospace Research Institute’s GEMS (The Geostationary Environmental Monitoring Spectrometer), the European Space Agency’s Sentinel-4/UVN, and NASA’s TEMPO, will maintain their positions in orbit as the Earth rotates, covering a majority of the area from East Asia through greater North America and Europe. Together, these instruments will make up a northern hemisphere air quality constellation.. All three of these instruments analyze the same pollutant concentrations in their respective region, from the morning to evening.
Another critical part of the global air quality constellation are the LEO instruments, such as TROPOMI (a.k.a. Sentinel-5P), which will launch in late 2016 and provide a common reference for the three GEO sensors, allowing for a more accurate assessment of air quality within each region.
Denise Lineberry
NASA Langley Research Center
The Bubble Nebula, also known as NGC 7653, captured by the Hubble Telescope.Photograph: Nasa/ Esa/ Hubble Heritage Team
photos from hubble space telescope
ESA's first step to Mars
Http://www.esa.int/spaceinimages/Images/2016/09/Philae_close-up Today is my 21st Birthday and ESA found philae for me!
NASA Co-Op Week 3: Sitting Console
A scene from the New York stock exchange center was what I expected from Mission Control. Imagining the flight director with a thick cigar and eyebrows raised, flight controllers sitting console arguing about an experiment or device gone haywire and astronauts happily floating and Tweeting hearing only commands from Cap-Com that got through. My expectation was fortunately far from the truth.
Mission Control is calm, controlled and direct. The flight director welcomes the console leads, PLUTO, Ops Plan, RIO, ROBO, ISO and so on. Each flight controller checks in with a status and their goals to accomplish. Astronauts join in every morning for a daily operations meeting asking questions about upcoming experiments and big ticket events. Cap-Com is the only position in Mission Control that speaks with the astronauts so other flight controllers let Cap-Com know what needs to be relayed to astronauts. While sitting console with PLUTO I could listen to all the audio loops, Russian translation loop, JAXA, ESA, each console, and other NASA centers.
HOW TO GET INVOLVED:
*Tour the Mission Control Center through Space Center Houston
*Apply for a Pathways Internship (Co-Op) NOW ONLY OPEN SEP 14-18 for Johnson Space Center
*Apply for an internship at one of the many NASA centers.
*Follow NASA on Tumblr