On September 12, a mirror-walled box arrived at Planet Labs’ clean room in San Francisco. This box contains a spectrometer specifically designed to observe carbon dioxide and methane on the Earth’s surface.
Forged at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) further south in California, this spectrometer’s stop in San Francisco will see it attached to a satellite called Tanager. The satellite, if all goes according to plan, will launch in 2024. The nonprofit organization Carbon Mapper hopes to use Tanager to pinpoint greenhouse gas “super emitters” on our planet.
The newly arrived spectrometer is a key component of the mission.
Related: NASA sensors could help detect methane in landfills from space to help limit climate change
This device is designed to observe infrared light reflected from the Earth’s surface, then separate the light into its spectrum. Different gases in Earth’s atmosphere each absorb different wavelengths of light, leaving characteristic gaps in the spectrum and allowing observers to reconstruct what gases were present at any given point.
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Before sending the spectrometer north, JPL staff tested the mechanism’s ability to perform this task. Inside a vacuum chamber, scientists place a sample of methane where it is clearly visible on the spectrometer. And according to JPL, the spectrometer succeeded.
“We are very pleased to see the extraordinary quality of the recorded methane spectra,” said Robert Green, instrument scientist at JPL, in a statement. “This bodes well for the space measurements that will soon follow.”
Carbon Mapper – a collaboration between JPL, Planet, the California Air Resources Board, Rocky Mountain Institute, Arizona State University, and the University of Arizona – has launched EMIT, an instrument on the International Space Station (ISS) that monitors mineral dust blown in from beyond space. desert earth. Later, this spectrometer will join from orbit around the Earth’s poles.
2023-09-19 11:03:09
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