NASA to Hold Media Briefing on New Global Air Quality Constellation

WASHINGTON, March 5, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- NASA is hosting a media teleconference at 10 a.m. EDT Monday, March 9, to discuss an international collaboration aimed at improving our understanding of air quality. The teleconference will stream live on the agency's website.

Scientists from the United States, South Korea, and the Netherlands will discuss a pioneering new constellation of space-based instruments designed to advance global air quality science and monitoring.

The first part of the three-mission constellation already is in space. Last month, South Korea's Geostationary Environment Monitoring Spectrometer (GEMS) instrument was launched aboard the GEO-KOMPSAT-2B satellite. During the next few years, GEMS will be joined by NASA's Tropospheric Emissions: Monitoring of Pollution (TEMPO) instrument and ESA's (European Space Agency's) Sentinel-4 spacecraft. Each mission will make hourly daytime air quality measurements over different parts of the Northern Hemisphere from geostationary orbit.

Panelists for the media teleconference are:

• Barry Lefer, tropospheric composition program manager in NASA's Earth Science Division at agency's headquarters, Washington
• Jhoon Kim, GEMS principal investigator at Yonsei University, Seoul, South Korea
• Kelly Chance, TEMPO principal investigator at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, Cambridge, Massachusetts
• Ben Veihelmann, Sentinel-4 principal investigator for ESA, Noordwijk, The Netherlands

To participate in the call, media must contact Joe Atkinson at [email protected] by 5 p.m. Sunday, March 8, for dial-in instructions. The public can send questions during the teleconference using the hashtag #AskNASA.

For more information about NASA's Earth science programs, visit:

https://www.nasa.gov/earth

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SOURCE NASA