NASA air pollution sensor finds satellite host

Technology News | February 4, 2020

By Rich Pell

Data Acquisition Optoelectronics Test and Measurement RF transmission IoT Sensing / Conditioning Wireless Communications

The agency announced that space technology company Maxar Technologies and communications satellite services provider Intelsat have agreed to partner to host TEMPO onboard the Intelsat 40e mission, which is scheduled to launch into geostationary orbit 22,236 miles above Earth’s equator in 2022. Once launched, the TEMPO UV-visible spectrometer will measure air quality over North America in unprecedented detail during daylight hours, says the agency.

TEMPO will detect pollutants by measuring sunlight reflected and scattered from the Earth’s surface and atmosphere. It will make hourly measurements of atmospheric gases – including ozone, nitrogen dioxide, and formaldehyde, as well as aerosols – across North America and provide air quality products that will be made publicly available and help improve air quality forecasting, enabling the more effective early public warning of pollution incidents.

“We are excited about this important step required to lay the operational framework for TEMPO’s critical air quality measurements,” says Stephen Hall, TEMPO project manager at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia. “We look forward to working closely with both Maxar and Intelsat for the successful integration, launch, and deployment of TEMPO.”

TEMPO will be part of a constellation of instruments measuring air quality over the Northern Hemisphere that will also include the European Space Agency’s Sentinel-4, currently in development, and South Korea’s Geostationary Environment Monitoring Spectrometer, scheduled to launch later this month.

The TEMPO instrument project is led by Principal Investigator Kelly Chance from the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory (SAO) in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The instrument was developed by Ball Aerospace in Boulder, Colorado, and is in storage awaiting shipment to Maxar’s satellite manufacturing facility in Palo Alto, California.

Maxar will integrate the TEMPO payload with the Intelsat 40e satellite. The Intelsat 40e is Intelsat’s newest addition to its next-generation Intelsat Epic platform, a high-performance satellite platform based on an open architecture, designed to deliver carrier-grade, dedicated high-throughput capacity to meet growing bandwidth needs of the company’s customers in all regions.

NASA Langley Research Center