TEMPO Instrument

The TEMPO instrument is a grating spectrometer, sensitive to visible and ultraviolet wavelengths of light, which will be attached to the Earth-facing side of a commercial telecommunications satellite (to be selected) in geostationary orbit. This allows TEMPO to maintain a constant view of North America so that the instrument's light-collecting mirror can make a complete East to West scan of the "Field of Regard" each and every hour of the day. By measuring sunlight reflected and scattered from the Earth's surface and atmosphere back to the instrument's detectors, TEMPO's ultraviolet and visible light sensors will provide spectra of ozone, nitrogen dioxide, and other elements of daily atmospheric chemistry cycles. Schematic of TEMPO Spectrometer © NASA/BATC/SAO. The instrument's optical system resolves a few square miles per pixel, so that pollution can be tracked at sub-urban scales. TEMPO's dataset showing daily (and hourly) variations in the concentrations of these pollutants will en

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• Abinaya Dinesh