Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Emerging Tech
  3. News

A new satellite is orbiting our planet to track greenhouse gases and pollution

By
Atlas V NROL-52 Launch Highlights
The evidence of pollution on Earth is already pretty evident to those of us living on Earth — at least, for those of us living in large cities or manufacturing hubs. But now we’re going beyond our planet to see just how bad things really are. The European Space Agency (ESA) has just launched the most advanced air-pollution-monitoring
Recommended Videos
satellite in history. Its goal is to map the global distribution of air pollutants in truly novel detail.
Related

On Friday, ESA controllers received the first signal from the Sentinel-5P satellite, which lifted off from the Plesetsk Cosmodrome in Russia about at around 5:30 a.m. EDT. The Sentinel-5P, otherwise known as Precursor, is a member of the European Union’s Copernicus program, which is the largest Earth-observation program in the world. And while there are a total of six satellites in orbit as part of this program, Precursor is the first and only to measure the chemistry of our planet’s atmosphere.

“Having Sentinel-5P in orbit will give us daily and global views at our atmosphere with a precision we never had before,” Josef Aschbacher, ESA’s director of Earth-observation programs, said in a statement.

While Precursor isn’t the first satellite to have this important mission, it is the first in quite some time. The only other satellite currently tasked with measuring pollution is NASA’s Aura, which was launched 13 years ago in 2014. And in the time since, quite a few improvements in technology have been made. As Stephen Briggs, senior advisor to the director of ESA’s Earth Observation program, told Space.com, “Sentinel-5P carries an instrument called Tropomi, which is very powerful because it has a very wide swath — 2,600 kilometers wide (1,615 miles). That means that it will give us the view of the whole Earth every day. Every day, we will get measurements of every point on the Earth.”

With Tropomi, which was developed in large part by the Netherlands’ national meteorological agency (KNMI), the satellite will measure several pollutants, including the levels of nitrogen dioxide and sulfur dioxide, which result from fossil fuels, as well as carbon monoxide, formaldehyde, ozone, and greenhouse gas methane.

“Tropomi will make 20 million observations every day, covering the entire globe at a resolution that is 10 times better than we have ever seen before,”  KNMI’s principal investigator Pepijn Veefkind told the BBC. “That allows us to see pollution in cities on a much finer scale. In Rotterdam, for example, we will be able to distinguish the harbour from the city centre; and we will be able to see the pollution in shipping lanes over the oceans.”

Editors’ Recommendations

Topics
Lulu Chang
Lulu Chang
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Fascinated by the effects of technology on human interaction, Lulu believes that if her parents can use your new app…
Discovery of 139 new minor planets in our solar system may help find Planet Nine
The Blanco Telescope dome at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile, where the Dark Energy Camera used for the recently completed Dark Energy Survey was housed.

Astronomers have discovered 139 new "minor planets" in our solar system, beyond the orbit of Neptune. These small objects could provide clues as to whether the mysterious Planet Nine, a hypothesized planet orbiting our sun which has not been directly observed, does really exist.

The minor planets were discovered using data from the Dark Energy Survey, a six-year project mainly focused on understanding dark energy. But the data collected is also useful for finding new bodies in our solar system, particularly trans-Neptunian objects or TNOs, because the survey covers a wide region of the sky in great detail.

Read more
SpaceX plan to put 42,000 satellites in orbit could face a big legal roadblock
starlink

On February 22, 2018, SpaceX successfully launched the first two Starlink test satellites (named Tintin A and Tintin B) from the Vandenberg Air Force base in California. SpaceX

The number of satellites shot into orbit is about to rocket. And astronomers are none too happy about it. Elon Musk’s SpaceX company has already announced plans to launch a constellation of up to 42,000 Starlink satellites. Other groups such as the UK’s OneWeb have plans for their own smaller scale launches, still numbering in the hundreds. These will add to the approximately 1,500 active satellites that are already in orbit.

Read more
Two orbiting satellites could collide tonight over Pittsburgh
penny

If you live in Pittsburgh and happen to spot some commotion in the sky at approximately 6:39 p.m. local time, don't freak out. It’s quite possible that you'll be looking at two satellites colliding 560 miles above the Earth as they crash into each other at high speed while circling the Earth. (Note: At that kind of height, you're unlikely to see anything at all.)

The possible collision was noted by space-tracking company LeoLabs. According to its latest estimates, which are based on a network of ground-level radars that are used to detect and track low-Earth-orbit objects, the chance of a possible collision between the two satellites is approximately one in 20. This would mean that, if they do not collide as speculated, the two satellites will pass one another with just 40 feet between them, the equivalent to less than half a basketball court. That’s pretty darn close.

Read more