NASA’s latest mission, the Tropospheric Emissions: Monitoring of Pollution (TEMPO) instrument, has launched from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. The TEMPO instrument will provide scientists with unprecedented resolution of air pollutants, down to four square miles, and will revolutionize the way air quality is observed from space. 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. This is 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 application. From its geostationary orbit, TEMPO will form part of an air quality satellite virtual constellation that will track pollution around the Northern Hemisphere. South Korea’s Geostationary Environment Monitoring Spectrometer, the first instrument in the constellation, launched into space in 2020 on the Korean Aerospace Research Institute GEO-KOMPSAT-2B satellite, and is measuring pollution over Asia. The ESA (European Space Agency) Sentinel-4 satellite, scheduled to launch in 2024, will make measurements over Europe and North Africa.
