Kacey Roberts
A space-based instrument Ball Aerospace manufactured for NASA has begun transmitting images meant to support air pollution research in North America.
Ball said Thursday the Tropospheric Emissions: Monitoring of Pollution system recently completed its first solar calibration scan mission, capturing major air pollutants like ozone, nitrogen dioxide, sulfur dioxide and formaldehyde.
The Maxar Technologies-built commercial Intelsat IS-40e satellite carried the atmospheric monitoring payload into space in April to measure high-resolution pollutants over the continent using a geostationary ultraviolet-visible spectrometer.
TEMPO is a collaborative mission between NASA’s Langley Research Center and the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics as part of the agency-led Earth Venture Instrument program.
The mission team will validate the mission’s performance in the coming months. Afterward, the general public and scientists can access near real-time data from CfA and NASA.
Ball is selling its aerospace business to BAE Systems in a $5.5 billion deal announced last week.
