WASHINGTON, March 31, 2023 - Media are invited to a NASA media teleconference 1 p.m. EDT Wednesday, April 5, to discuss the upcoming launch of the first space-based instrument to observe major air pollutants across North America every hour during the daytime.

The agency will livestream audio of the teleconference on its website.

NASA's TEMPO (Tropospheric Emissions Monitoring of Pollution instrument) will improve life on Earth by revolutionizing the way scientists observe air quality. A partnership between NASA and the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory – a part of the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian – TEMPO will launch on a commercial mission in early April.

The briefing participants are:

Karen St. Germain, Earth Science Division director, NASA Headquarters
Kevin Daugherty, TEMPO project manager, NASA's Langley Research Center
Xiong Liu, TEMPO deputy principal investigator, Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian
Dennis Nicks, director of payload engineering, Ball Aerospace
Aaron Abell, TEMPO project manager, Maxar
Jean-Luc Froeliger, senior vice president of Space Systems, Intelsat
Media interested in participating in the teleconference must RSVP to Joe Atkinson no later than one hour prior to the start of the event at joseph.s.atkinson@nasa.gov.

TEMPO will be the first space-based instrument to monitor major air pollutants hourly in high spatial resolution—down to four square miles—in a region stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and from the Canadian oil sands to below Mexico City, encompassing the entire continental United States.

The instrument is a payload on the satellite Intelsat 40E. It was built by Ball Aerospace and integrated onto Intelsat 40E by Maxar.

For more information on NASA Earth science, visit:

https://nasa.gov/earth

SOURCE NASA