An air quality instrument will be launched by NASA and SpaceX

 

NASA announced on Thursday that the launch of its air quality monitoring instrument by SpaceX and the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is planned for no earlier than 12:30 a.m. Eastern Time on Friday.

The TEMPO (Tropospheric Emissions Monitoring of Pollution Instrument) experiment will launch on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Cape Canaveral, Florida.

According to NASA, TEMPO is the first space-based instrument to monitor major air pollutants hourly with high spatial resolution — down to four square miles — in a region spanning from the Atlantic to the Pacific and from the Canadian oil sands to below Mexico City, which includes the entire continental United States.