A satellite took off overnight from Thursday to Friday with “Tempo” on board, a tool that will measure the air quality in North America hour by hour. It will allow “to anticipate pollution”, estimates Marie-Ange Sanguy, editor-in-chief of the magazine Espace et Exploration.
Tempo, the new space tool for measuring pollution, “is not a gimmick at all“, explained Friday April 7 on franceinfo Marie-Ange Sanguy, editor-in-chief of the magazine Espace et Exploration, while a satellite took off in the night from Thursday to Friday from Florida, with on board this new instrument of the Nasa Tempo will measure hour-by-hour, neighborhood-by-neighbourhood air pollution over North America. This scientific tool will “help us protect our land, analyze our land and prepare some things or fix some things“, details Marie-Ange Sanguy, for whom Tempo will allow”to anticipate pollution” in order to “to prevent the population from suffering“.
franceinfo: Is Tempo an interesting gadget or tool?
Marie-Ange Sanguy: It’s not a gimmick at all. It is an extremely interesting and extremely important tool. You should know that Tempo is part of a future constellation that will monitor the entire northern hemisphere. Tempo will take care of the entire North American part in the broad sense, that is to say roughly from Cuba and Mexico to the top of Canada, and monitor hour by hour what is happening there, analyze everything that is ozone, sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxide. All of this is constantly monitored. Part of this constellation took off in 2020 to monitor Asia from South Korea with GEMS which is on GEO-KOMPSAT-2B. And there is for Europe and North Africa Sentinel-4 which will leave on MTG-S1 with the future Ariane 6 and which will do the same thing. It is a small constellation which will make a large amplitude all around the northern hemisphere.
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Is it NASA communication vis-à-vis its competitors?
There, it’s really not competition, we are really on a tool. We absolutely must use space tools to help us protect our lands, analyze our lands and prepare certain things or repair certain things. Tempo is part of what we need to monitor all this pollution and try to see what we can do in real time. When you analyze hour by hour what is happening, if you see clouds of sulfur dioxide, if you see ozone moving in certain places, you can warn the population, you can put in place certain barriers, certain traffic stops, for example, to reduce all that. It’s not gimmicky, it’s not competition, it’s really everyone’s work.
Is the idea to be able to anticipate the waves of pollution?
Absolutely. We must anticipate, prevent and try to do everything we can to prevent the population from suffering. When there are pollution problems, there are asthma and allergy problems…
There are people who have serious respiratory problems. And if we manage to anticipate, we can say to these people, ‘stay at home because there is the cloud heading towards you’.
Marie-Ange Sanguyat franceinfo
In order to monitor pollution on Earth, isn’t space being polluted even more with satellites which are already extremely numerous, including when they no longer work?
You have to understand one thing, and that is that these satellites are very useful. They have not polluted for several years, there is a charter that has been signed. Satellites that are dead, that are no longer in use, either we put them into a garbage orbit that won’t bother us, or we bring them back down to Earth and destroy them in the atmosphere. A lot of companies are figuring out how to do that in the future, because it’s going to be a very lucrative business to take satellites and bring them back down to earth to repackage them, take pieces out of them, or just destroy them in the atmosphere. Of the first dozen satellites we launched, we didn’t really care. We sent everything, anything, anyhow. It has changed, the problem is taken into account.