Welcome to TEMPO

Mission Overview

NASA's first Earth Venture Instrument mission will measure pollution of North America, from Mexico City to the Canadian oil sands, and from the Atlantic to the Pacific hourly and at high spatial resolution. TEMPO observations are from the geostationary vantage point, flying on a telecommunications host spacecraft with the goal to launch in 2023.

TEMPO Fact Sheet

TEMPO Brochure

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TEMPO Instrument

The TEMPO instrument is a UV-visible spectrometer, and will be the first ever space-based instrument to monitor air pollutants hourly across the North American continent during daytime. It will collect high-resolution measurements of ozone, nitrogen dioxide and other pollutants, data which will revolutionize air quality forecasts.

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Latest News

April 07, 2023 | Liftoff! TEMPO Instrument Soars into Space
Cape Canaveral, FL – On Friday, April 7 at 12:30 a.m. ET, the motors of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket rumbled to life and ignited, lighting up the otherwise dark morning sky. The rocket blasted off from launch pad 40 at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. Its mission: to carry the satellite, Intelsat 40e — host of the NASA-Smithsonian instrument TEMPO — into space.

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Graphic overview of TEMPO mission TEMPO will be the North American component of a global group of satellites tracking air pollution from geosynchronous orbit. Artist's illustration of TEMPO satellite host The TEMPO mission will measure air pollution at 355 times the resolution of the GOME-2 satellite, and 50 times the OMI satellite's spatial scale. Illustration of data flow for TEMPO operations