TEMPO Instrument Arrives Safely in Florida
Cambridge, MA – The satellite host of NASA's Tropospheric Emissions: Monitoring of Pollution (TEMPO) instrument recently arrived by aircraft at NASA's Kennedy Space Center ahead of its launch from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in early April.
From a geostationary, or fixed, orbit aboard the Maxar-built Intelsat 40e, TEMPO will be the first satellite instrument to make hourly daytime observations of air quality over North America, including the entire continental United States. These observations will vastly improve the scientific data record on air pollution in North America — and lead to new discoveries about the air we breathe.
At the Cape, Intelsat 40e will undergo final testing to ensure it is ready for launch aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, and then integration onto the rocket. Ball Aerospace built the TEMPO instrument.
TEMPO Principal Investigator Kelly Chance is based at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory — part of the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian — in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The TEMPO project team is based at NASA's Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia.
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