CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — Having clean air is a key part of being able to live a healthy and productive life. The ability to gauge the quality of air across North America is about to take an important leap forward.  

On Friday, April 7, NASA and the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory (SAO) launched a joint mission instrument dubbed Trophospheric Emissions: Monitoring of Pollution or TEMPO. They aim to get a better understanding of air pollution by taking hourly measurements.

That rapid pace of reevaluation stands in stark contrast to previous air quality observing satellites that only visited locations maybe once per day and took in data in wide patches.

“Up to now, we’ve been able to look at air pollution around the world just once per day and at fairly coarse spatial resolution,” said Barry Lefer, the tropospheric composition program manager at NASA. “And because of the ability of TEMPO to be able to see many times per day, during the daytime, and to do it at finer spatial resolution, we’ve really gotten the attention of our partners at NOAA and the EPA.”

Those two agencies, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Environmental Protection Agency, were what Lefer describes as early adopters of the forthcoming data. They’ve since been joined by hundreds of others, including the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

“They are really interested in looking at the impacts of air pollution on people’s health,” Lefer said. “And so once again, that once-a-day at coarse resolution makes it tough for them to see what people are breathing.”

According to NOAA, about 60,000 premature deaths in the United States can be attributed to poor air quality each year. It also costs about $150 billion due to air pollution-related illnesses.

Dr. Usman Mazahir is a pulmonary and critical care physician at Independent Lung Associates, which works with Steward Medical Group in Brevard County. He said the quality of the air around people, especially those with preexisting lung issues, can bring about a bad recipe.

‘’For people with underlying asthma and COPD, that can be a big issue. It causes their symptoms to get worse, it makes it more difficult for us to treat them,” Mazahir said.

Covering new ground from space

The TEMPO payload is a $210 million investment for NASA with a little over $90 million coming from the development of the payload itself. The project was greenlit back in 2012, but after it was completed, they had to find a suitable host satellite.

It found that ride in Intelsat’s IS-40e satellite, which was launched to geostationary orbit by SpaceX. During a pre-launch press conference, Kevin Daugherty, the project manager for TEMPO at NASA said that at the time, there was a thought that more payloads might find similar rideshares, but that has proven difficult.

Maxar is the company that built the satellite for Intelsat.

“So, that process allowed us to come to the table with a fully completed fully tested instrument, which has helped us to fit into the commercial timeline for spacecraft development that moves at a very rapid rate,” Daugherty said. “We’re actually here right now working on a lessons learned session to collect a whole host of lessons across the board on hosted payloads.”

Once in orbit, TEMPO will use a combination of visible and ultraviolet spectrometer to study levels and variations of nitrogen dioxide, ozone and other components that lead to air pollution. It’s not designed to track things like greenhouse gases though.

“Because what TEMPO does measure comes from combustion, it’s coming from the pollution coming from the tailpipe of your car or coming from a coal power plant,” Lefer said. “And again, we’re going to be able to see it every hour, whereas the current satellites that measure CO2 or methane, they come by maybe once a day with a narrow swath.”

“And so, we might see a particular pollution source once every week or less. And so, being able to see it every hour, the NO2 or the SO2 that’s coming out of that smoke stack, we’ll have a much better way of estimating the total impact of a certain pollution source on the climate,” Lefer continued.

Part of the goal of this mission is not only to better empower scientists and researchers but also communities. Erika Wright, an education specialist at the Center for Astrophysics Harvard & Smithsonian, said getting the data into the hands of communities and especially young people will be key.

She said she’s working with educators across the country to develop resources that make the TEMPO data available to teenagers.

 “What we really want is for people to not just understand that TEMPO is monitoring air quality and that scientists are using it, but that it’s usable to the community,” Wright said. “There’s so much you can learn about your air quality, what’s in your back yard and make differences within your community.”

She said part of her educational mission is to help people realize the wide-ranging impacts that air quality has across all parts of life.

“It impacts so many things that a lot of people might not realize. It is our human health, it’s our environmental health, it’s agricultural health. Crop production can decrease with poor air quality,” Wright said. “So, there’s lots of areas that can be impacted by better understanding our air quality and how it’s moving across our country from community to community.”

Working in concert

Following its launch, the Intelsat IS-40e satellite with the TEMPO payload will take a couple weeks to get into its proper orbit before it can start a few months of commissioning. Wright said it should start to send back data in late summer or early fall.

Once it’s operational, it won’t be acting in a vacuum. Two other satellites are monitoring large portions of Europe, Northern Africa and Asia.

South Korea launched its Geostationary Environment Monitoring Spectrometer (GEMS) in 2020 aboard an Arianespace Ariane 5 rocket. It’s currently tracking air pollution levels in high-emission areas, like China and India.

The European Space Agency is working towards the launch of Sentinel-4 in March 2024. This three-satellite constellation will provide global researchers with a much more holistic picture of the air pollution situation globally.