Maxar will install a NASA pollution sensor on a commercial satellite

SAN FRANCISCO – Maxar Technologies is considering installing a NASA sensor to monitor air pollution in North America on a commercial telecommunication satellite that will move into geostationary orbit by 2022, NASA and NASA announced on July 22. Maxar.

Maxar executives are discussing with several customers the possibility of stealing the payload but have not yet signed a contract with a communications satellite operator to install the tropospheric pollution sensor: pollution monitoring, called TEMPO, on a specific satellite, Al Tadros, vice president of space infrastructure and civilian space ", said SpaceNews. "We have a lot of interest in that," added Tadros.

TEMPO's builder, Ball Aerospace, announced late 2018 that it has delivered TEMPO, a spectrometer designed for observing visible and ultraviolet light, at NASA's Langley Research Center. TEMPO will provide hourly pollution reports over ten square kilometer areas during the day from its perch in geostationary orbit.

TEMPO will provide measurements for 18 zones, illustrating the evolution of air quality throughout the day, said Kelly Chance, TEMPO 's chief investigator, of the. Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory. "It will show how cities wake up and fall asleep in pollution," Chance said. SpaceNews.

NASA used the Hosted Payload Solutions contracted vehicle from the Air Force Center and the United States Air Force to solicit TEMPO proposals. The Air Force announced in 2014 that 14 companies were eligible for Hosted Payload Solutions. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration relied on this contract to award a $ 37.9 million contract to General Atomics Electromagnetic Systems to install the advanced Argos data collection system on a Benchmark satellite. Orbital test.

Ball Aerospace built TEMPO with a similar instrument, the Geostationary Environmental Monitoring Spectrometer, which is scheduled for launch in 2020 on GEO-Kompsat-2B of the Korea Aerospace Research Institute. TEMPO and GEMS are designed to form a global constellation of air quality monitoring with the Sentinel 4 European Spectrometer, which will be driven by Eumetsat's Meteosat third generation weather satellites.

If the instruments are working well, they could pave the way for operational air pollution monitoring systems, Chance said.

Maxar Technologies has done studies for NASA on "TEMPO accommodation on our 1300 bus," said Tadros. "This is the offer we have presented and it's the plan to launch it by 2022."

"The TEMPO payload has completed production and was fully qualified last year," said Stephen Hall, NASA's TEMPO project leader, in a statement. "Now, with Maxar leading the integration of TEMPO on a commercial satellite, the mission will progress rapidly in terms of launch and operation."

Chance said in a statement: "TEMPO will revolutionize the way NASA will sample and badyze critical measurements of air quality." NASA partners that will help badyze TEMPO data include the US Environmental Protection Agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the National Center for Atmospheric Research, US. universities, Mexico and Canada, he added.