NASA Announces New Hosted Payload Mission
NASA has selected a proposal from the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge, Mass., to build the first space-based instrument to monitor major air pollutants across the North American continent hourly during daytime.
The instrument, to be completed in 2017 at a cost of not more than $90 million, will share a ride on a commercial satellite as a hosted payload to an orbit about 22,000 miles above Earth’s equator.
The competitively selected proposal, Tropospheric Emissions: Monitoring of Pollution (TEMPO), is led by principal investigator Kelly Chance of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory.