Turn up the temp (8/24/23)

Good afternoon, and happy Thursday. It’s been a pretty wild week in Moon news. A Russian lander crashed, an Indian lander safely touched down, and Japan is planning to launch a mission of its own tomorrow. Personally, I’m loving this new era of space exploration.

Did someone forward you this email? Subscribe to Parallax here.

Taking the Temperature

NASA’s newest climate probe is finally sending data home. This morning, the agency released the first six images from its TEMPO (Tropospheric Emissions: Monitoring of Pollution) spacecraft since its launch in April, showing the concentration of air pollutants across North America.

The images were taken within a 6-hour span on Aug. 2, and show the difference in air quality over a few highly populated areas as a few hours have elapsed. This first set, taken during the instrument’s first few days of observations, track nitrogen dioxide levels.

“TEMPO is beginning to measure hourly daytime air pollution over greater North America,” Kelly Chance, TEMPO principal investigator, said in a NASA release. “It measures ozone, nitrogen dioxide, formaldehyde, aerosols, water vapor, and several trace gases. There are already almost 50 science studies being planned that are based around this new way to collect data.”

Slicing up the light: The instrument aboard TEMPO is a grating spectrometer that can pick up on both visible and UV light. Light from Earth is reflected into the instrument and broken down into its component wavelengths, which researchers back home can analyze to suss out where that particular signature of light came from.

Different materials and elements reflect different light spectra, and the spectrograph is looking specifically for the signatures of common pollutants. At bottom, the same process that JWST uses to figure out whether a given exoplanet has water vapor in its atmosphere can be used closer to home to figure out where pollutants are coming from.

Using the data: From the broad sets of data that TEMPO will make available to the public, NASA hopes that scientists will be able to refine research on the effects of common pollutants on health, as well as to better characterize the polluting effects of traffic, wildfires, and other events.

Right now, the instrument is still undergoing commissioning, getting ready to start performing its full-scale, hourly science observations. From there, NASA will begin sharing its data with NOAA, the EPA, and other government agencies for scientific applications.

Other News from the Cosmos

• Pluto was officially reclassified as a dwarf planet on this day in 2006.

• NASA is preparing to receive its decadal survey on space research and discovery, which will guide the next 10 years of science projects in space.

• The Parker Solar Probe made its sixth of seven planned Venus flybys to get its orbit even closer to the solar surface.

• ESO’s Extremely Large Telescope, the aptly-named largest optical telescope in the world, is officially halfway built.

• A dark spot on Neptune, likely caused by a brief clearing of the clouds, was spotted by a telescope on Earth for the first time (though flyby missions have seen the spots before).

• Faint pulses from an old pulsar were detected during a period of assumed dormancy using FAST (the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope).

• Solar Orbiter spotted lots of tiny plumes, called “picoflare jets,” inside a hole in the solar corona, and researchers believe these jets may help to fuel the solar wind.

• Bone marrow fat may hold the answer to replenish the loss in red blood cells and bone density associated with long-term spaceflight.

• A “hot Jupiter,” a type of planet with similar characteristics to our solar system’s OG Jupiter but orbiting much closer to its respective star, with a surface temperature 2,000 degrees hotter than the surface of the Sun was characterized ~1,400 light-years away.

The View from Space

This week, JWST released a new image of the Ring Nebula, revealing the delicate swirls of gas encircling a glowing center.