Lighting up the overnight sky, a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket streaked into orbit early Friday carrying an Intelsat communications satellite hosting a $210 million NASA-Smithsonian spectrometer designed to measure air quality and pollution across North America.
The Intelsat 40E satellite will provide broadband data to mobile users, from commercial aircraft to cruise ships, while at the same time serving as a platform for the Tropospheric Emissions: Monitoring of Pollution, or TEMPO, light analyzer.
Data collected by TEMPO will help researchers develop more accurate air quality forecasts and a deeper knowledge of atmospheric chemistry. It is the first such instrument designed to monitor air pollution over the Americas, on an hourly basis, from space.
A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket climbs away from the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station carrying a powerful Intelsat communications satellite hosting a NASA spectrometer to monitor air pollution levels across North America.
William Harwood/CBS News
“You’ve probably seen satellite imagery of hurricanes, and you can see it moving and swirling, you’re visualizing the weather,” TEMPO researcher Laura Judd said in an interview with CBS News. “Instead of seeing clouds, what we’re going to see are these largely invisible pollutants, and we call that ‘chemical weather.’
“You are going to see where they originate and how they’re blowing, where they’re going. You’ll also see them go away, because they’ll interact chemically and turn into some other species or they’ll deposit onto the ground. But largely, what TEMPO’s going to give us is the visualization of chemical weather.”
SpaceX’s 23rd launch this year got off to a thundering start at 12:30 a.m. EDT when the Falcon 9’s nine first stage engines roared to life at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station.
Liftoff! At 12:30 p.m. EDT.
SpaceX
Climbing away to the east over the Atlantic Ocean, the rocket put on a spectacular show as it smoothly accelerated, shattering the overnight calm with a crackling roar as it consumed propellants, lost weight and accelerated atop 1.7 million pounds of thrust.
After boosting the rocket out of the lower atmosphere, the first stage peeled away and headed for landing on an offshore droneship while the second stage carried out two engine firings to reach the planned payload deploy orbit.
All of that went by the book, and the Intelsat 40E satellite was released to fly on its own 32 minutes after launch.
Built by Maxar, the 13,500-pound satellite will use on-board thrusters to reach its operational orbit 22,300 miles above the equator at 91 degrees west longitude where it will take 24 hours to complete one orbit and will thus stay perched in the sky above North America.
“Its primary commercial mission is connectivity for mobility services,” said Jean-Luc Froeliger, Intelsat senior vice president of Space Systems. “What it means is providing internet services for commercial airline passengers, internet services for regional business jets as well as for cruise passengers. Mobility services from Intelsat 40E will also assist with disaster recovery.”
Checkout and calibration will take until the end of May when commercial operations will begin and the TEMPO instrument, built by Ball Aerospace, will be turned on. Data from the instrument will be collected by Intelsat and relayed to Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory researchers for analysis.
An artist’s impression of the Intelsat 40E communications satellite and the TEMPO air pollution spectrometer.
Maxar
“One of the things that makes us unique is that we are developed as a hosted payload, which is a relatively new business model that NASA is using to enable placing instruments like TEMPO into an orbit at greatly reduced cost,” said TEMPO project manager Kevin Daugherty of NASA’s Langley Research Center
“So TEMPO will be riding on a geostationary communications satellite looking at the same region of Earth every day — greater North America — rather than getting a once-a-day look, often at the same time of day, in low-Earth orbit.”
About the size of a home washing machine, TEMPO’s ultraviolet-visible light spectrometer will capture sunlight reflected from the atmosphere, separating it into 2,000 component wavelengths.
That hyperspectral data will capture the chemical fingerprints of gases in the atmosphere and help researchers determine concentrations, movement and threats to public health.
Along with helping provide more accurate pollution advisories, TEMPO data will be used in concert with ground-based instruments to improve computer models of atmospheric chemistry.
“TEMPO will provide not only an independent dataset to validate (whether) models actually capture what happens in the morning and how it evolves into the afternoon, there are also scientists … working on ingesting TEMPO data within their models as a constraint to make those models better.
“The goal is to create more accurate air quality forecasts, which in the end, we can (use to) better inform the public on air quality local to their area.”
TEMPO is the second of three planned space-based pollution monitors. The first such instrument — the Geostationary Environment Monitoring Spectrometer, or GEMS — was launched with a Korean satellite in 2020 to cover eastern Asia.
The third instrument in the series, known as Sentinel 4, will launch with a European Meteosat relay station to monitor air quality across North Africa, Europe and western Asia.
NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) — The body of Ugandan Olympic athlete Rebecca Cheptegei — who died after being set on fire by her partner in Kenya — was received Friday by family and anti-femicide crusaders, ahead of her burial a day later.
Cheptegei’s family met with dozens of activists Friday who had marched to the Moi Teaching and Referral Hospital’s morgue in the western city of Eldoret while chanting anti-femicide slogans.
She is the fourth female athlete to have been killed by her partner in Kenya in yet another case of gender-based violence in recent years.
Viola Cheptoo, the founder of Tirop Angels – an organization that was formed in honor of athlete Agnes Tirop, who was stabbed to death in 2021, said stakeholders need to ensure this is the last death of an athlete due to gender-based violence.
“We are here to say that enough is enough, we are tired of burying our sisters due to GBV,” she said.
It was a somber mood at the morgue as athletes and family members viewed Cheptegei’s body which sustained 80% of burns after she was doused with gasoline by her partner Dickson Ndiema. Ndiema sustained 30% burns on his body and later succumbed.
Ndiema and Cheptegei were said to have quarreled over a piece of land that the athlete bought in Kenya, according to a report filed by the local chief.
Cheptegei competed in the women’s marathon at the Paris Olympics less than a month before the attack. She finished in 44th place.
Cheptegei’s father, Joseph, said that the body will make a brief stop at their home in the Endebess area before proceeding to Bukwo in eastern Uganda for a night vigil and burial on Saturday.
“We are in the final part of giving my daughter the last respect,” a visibly distraught Joseph said.
He told reporters last week that Ndiema was stalking and threatening Cheptegei and the family had informed police.
Four in 10 women or an estimated 41% of dating or married Kenyan women have experienced physical or sexual violence perpetrated by their current or most recent partner, according to the Kenya Demographic and Health Survey 2022.
TEL AVIV, Israel (AP) — A rare Bronze-Era jar accidentally smashed by a 4-year-old visiting a museum was back on display Wednesday after restoration experts were able to carefully piece the artifact back together.
Last month, a family from northern Israel was visiting the museum when their youngest son tipped over the jar, which smashed into pieces.
Alex Geller, the boy’s father, said his son — the youngest of three — is exceptionally curious, and that the moment he heard the crash, “please let that not be my child” was the first thought that raced through his head.
The jar has been on display at the Hecht Museum in Haifa for 35 years. It was one of the only containers of its size and from that period still complete when it was discovered.
The Bronze Age jar is one of many artifacts exhibited out in the open, part of the Hecht Museum’s vision of letting visitors explore history without glass barriers, said Inbal Rivlin, the director of the museum, which is associated with Haifa University in northern Israel.
It was likely used to hold wine or oil, and dates back to between 2200 and 1500 B.C.
Rivlin and the museum decided to turn the moment, which captured international attention, into a teaching moment, inviting the Geller family back for a special visit and hands-on activity to illustrate the restoration process.
Rivlin added that the incident provided a welcome distraction from the ongoing war in Gaza. “Well, he’s just a kid. So I think that somehow it touches the heart of the people in Israel and around the world,“ said Rivlin.
Roee Shafir, a restoration expert at the museum, said the repairs would be fairly simple, as the pieces were from a single, complete jar. Archaeologists often face the more daunting task of sifting through piles of shards from multiple objects and trying to piece them together.
Experts used 3D technology, hi-resolution videos, and special glue to painstakingly reconstruct the large jar.
Less than two weeks after it broke, the jar went back on display at the museum. The gluing process left small hairline cracks, and a few pieces are missing, but the jar’s impressive size remains.
The only noticeable difference in the exhibit was a new sign reading “please don’t touch.”
VICTORIA – The British Columbia government is partnering with a bear welfare group to reduce the number of bears being euthanized in the province.
Nicholas Scapillati, executive director of Grizzly Bear Foundation, said Monday that it comes after months-long discussions with the province on how to protect bears, with the goal to give the animals a “better and second chance at life in the wild.”
Scapillati said what’s exciting about the project is that the government is open to working with outside experts and the public.
“So, they’ll be working through Indigenous knowledge and scientific understanding, bringing in the latest techniques and training expertise from leading experts,” he said in an interview.
B.C. government data show conservation officers destroyed 603 black bears and 23 grizzly bears in 2023, while 154 black bears were killed by officers in the first six months of this year.
Scapillati said the group will publish a report with recommendations by next spring, while an independent oversight committee will be set up to review all bear encounters with conservation officers to provide advice to the government.
Environment Minister George Heyman said in a statement that they are looking for new ways to ensure conservation officers “have the trust of the communities they serve,” and the panel will make recommendations to enhance officer training and improve policies.
Lesley Fox, with the wildlife protection group The Fur-Bearers, said they’ve been calling for such a committee for decades.
“This move demonstrates the government is listening,” said Fox. “I suspect, because of the impending election, their listening skills are potentially a little sharper than they normally are.”
Fox said the partnership came from “a place of long frustration” as provincial conservation officers kill more than 500 black bears every year on average, and the public is “no longer tolerating this kind of approach.”
“I think that the conservation officer service and the B.C. government are aware they need to change, and certainly the public has been asking for it,” said Fox.
Fox said there’s a lot of optimism about the new partnership, but, as with any government, there will likely be a lot of red tape to get through.
“I think speed is going to be important, whether or not the committee has the ability to make change and make change relatively quickly without having to study an issue to death, ” said Fox.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 9, 2024.
