NASA & SpaceX can monitor air pollution from space; read to know how

The American space agency, National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) in collaboration with Elon Musk's SpaceX has launched an air-quality monitor called TEMPO or Tropospheric Emissions Monitoring of Pollution Instrument on April 7.

NASA in a media advisory said, "The NASA-Smithsonian instrument TEMPO is the first space-based tool to monitor major air pollutants hourly in high spatial resolution – down to four square miles – in a region stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific and from the Canadian oil sands to below Mexico City, encompassing the entire continental United States."

TEMPO can measure atmospheric pollution down to a spatial resolution of four square miles (10 square kilometres), or neighbourhood level.

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"Geostationary orbit is a common orbit for weather satellites and communications satellites, but an air quality instrument measuring gases hadn't been there yet," said Caroline Nowlan, an atmospheric physicist at the Harvard & Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

Existing pollution-monitoring satellites are in low Earth orbit, which means they can only provide observations once a day at a fixed time. "We can get measurements, say, over New York City at 1:30 in the afternoon," Nowlan said. "But that's just one data point over New York City over a day.

"The great thing about TEMPO is that for the first time, we'll be able to make hourly measurements over North America, so we'll be able to see what's happening over a whole day as long as the sun is up."

In 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 -- North America -- at all times.

According to the Twitter post by The American space agency, "TEMPO would provide hourly, daytime measurements of air quality in North America. It will monitor three main pollutants and reveal disparities in exposure in our cities and communities."