Tropospheric Emissions Monitoring of Pollution (TEMPO)

Why in news?

• SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launched the Tropospheric Emissions Monitoring of Pollution (TEMPO) instrument from Florida, USA.

About Tropospheric Emissions Monitoring of Pollution (TEMPO):

• TEMPO is a NASA device that can track air pollution over North America from space.
• It will allow scientists to monitor air pollutants and their emission sources down to the neighbourhood level.
• A unique feature of TEMPO is that it will be hosted on an Intelsat communications satellite in a geostationary orbit.
• Existing pollution-monitoring satellites are in low Earth orbit, which means they can only provide observations once a day at a fixed time.
• More than 40%of the US population, 137 million people, lives in places with unhealthy levels of particle pollution or ozone. Air pollution is blamed for some 60,000 premature deaths a year.

About Geostationary orbit:

• The geostationary orbit is a special case of the geosynchronous orbit, which is any orbit with a period equal to Earth’s rotation period.
• The height of a geostationary orbit is approximately 35,786 kilometers (22,236 miles) above the Earth’s equator.
• It is a common orbit for weather satellites and communications satellites.

PRACTICE QUESTION:

Which of the following satellites are generally placed in geostationary orbits?

1. Resource mapping satellites

2. Weather satellites

3. Communications satellites.

Select the correct answer using the code given below:

(a) 1 and 2 only

(b) 3 only

(c) 2 and 3 only

(d) 1, 2 and 3

Answer-C