197 What, exactly, is in the air we’re breathing? How did it get that way? Answers to those basic questions have been surprisingly elusive. In the US, air quality data comes mostly from a patchy fabric of ground-based sensors. In counties that have monitors—most don’t—they tend to be in and around cities, which means they miss shorter-lived and fast-traveling pollution in rural areas. “In some states, we only have one or two ground-based stations,” said Xiong Liu, a senior physicist and TEMPO’s deputy principal investigator at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory and a member of the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian. In other parts of the world, pollution data is even harder to come by. But Liu and his colleagues are quietly working to revolutionize our view of the skies. Over the past several months, an instrument they developed, called TEMPO, has begun providing measurements of harmful aerosols and gases in our air (currently including nitrogen dioxide and ozone, and eventually including sulfur dioxide, bromine monoxide, and organic molecules such as formaldehyde) at unprecedented scale, and from the highest perch a pollution hunter has ever had: some 22,000 miles above North America. Even after a decade of development and preparation, looking at the first images, Liu was stunned. “We’re amazed by the detail,” he said. There’s already an international fleet of air monitoring satellites in low earth orbit, about 300 miles up, which take observations along their path as they circle Earth once a day. From 22,000 Miles Up, A New Sensor Can Track Air Pollution to Its Source Safeguarding Habitats and Wildlife
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