SAN FRANCISCO – The primary NASA satellite to measure air pollution hourly shows a lot promise that space agency officials are already eager about ways to increase its life.
“We would like TEMPO to last for 10 years, if possible,” Barry Lefer, NASA tropospheric composition program manager, said Dec. 12 on the American Geophysical Union annual meeting here. “So, we’re going to baby it.”
TEMPO, short for Tropospheric Emissions: Monitoring of Pollution, was sent aloft in April as a hosted payload on Intelsat 40e, a geostationary communications satellite. The instrument, built by Ball Aerospace to measure atmospheric pollution from Canada’s oil sands to the Yucatán Peninsula and from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean, made its first North American scans in early August.
NASA researchers immediately began comparing TEMPO data with airborne measurements of the identical locations.
Since August, “the TEMPO team has been busy testing out all different parts of the instrument and optimizing that scan pattern,” Lefer said. “Probably the most exciting thing is it’s working incredibly well.”
![](https://i0.wp.com/spacenews.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/rsz_tempo_cover_image_complete_slit_footprint1.jpg?resize=780%2C627&ssl=1)
NASA Pathfinder
TEMPO is NASA’s first Earth-observation satellite in geostationary orbit. Previous polar-orbiting satellites provided day by day observations. In contrast, TEMPO is providing 10 to 12 day by day scans.
“It’s the primary time to have the range of spectral data from a geostationary satellite,” said Hazem Mahmoud, an Earth scientist from NASA’s Langley Research Center. “We’ve got been working on development of recent software capability to handle this very high temporal resolution data.”
NASA will share data on atmospheric concentrations of nitrogen dioxide, formaldehyde and ozone with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Environmental Protection Agency to enhance air quality forecasts.
Greater than 500 early adopters have already got access to TEMPO data. Validated data is scheduled to be released publicly in April.
![](https://i0.wp.com/spacenews.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/global.jpg?resize=700%2C440&ssl=1)
TEMPO and GEMS
Along with TEMPO, Ball Aerospace developed and built the Geostationary Environment Monitoring Spectrometer for the South Korean National Institute of Environmental Research.
The 2 instruments are similar, but TEMPO has fewer redundant parts than GEM, launched in 2020.
“TEMPO was a really inexpensive cost-capped mission,” Lefer said. “As a pathfinder, we developed the brand new technology and proved that it really works. Then, we work with NOAA on the following generation.”
NOAA’s Atmospheric Composition Instrument, an improved version of TEMPO, is scheduled to launch sometime within the mid 2030s on a Geostationary Prolonged Observations satellite over the central United States.
TEMPO is designed to operate in orbit for not less than 20 months, but NASA officials hope it lasts for much longer. Intelsat has assured NASA that it plans to maintain TEMPO’s host satellite in orbit for 10 to fifteen years.
“If the instrument continues to operate, we’ll proceed to gather data for that whole time,” Lefer said.
Virtual Constellation
A virtual constellation to observe air pollution over the Northern Hemisphere might be created by TEMPO, GEMS and the European Space Agency’s Meteosat Third Generation Sounder satellite, scheduled to launch in 2024.
The space agencies are working closely together to jointly calibrate and validate the assorted instruments.