NASA with Ball’s technological aid launches TEMPO to assess air condition

On April 7, Ball Aerospace officially felicitated the successful launch of its Tropospheric Emissions: Monitoring of Pollution (TEMPO) instrument. This is one of Ball and NASA's sustainability initiatives in a coalition, wherein the instrument would supply critical data on air pollution in the North American ecosphere.

Tempo was launched with the help of a commercial satellite via Florida's Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. This Earth Venture instrument mission by NASA can be regarded as the first of its kind to be ever developed by the space agency.

Tempo has been programmed to display high-resolution daytime levels of prime air pollutants each hour as it scans over the entire continent, from Mexico City's coasts to the Canadian oil sands in Alberta. This instrument will provide the scientific community with reliable data so that air quality forecasts can be made more accurately in the future.

The vice president of Civil Space Ball Aerospace, Dr Alberto Conti, exclaimed: "The TEMPO instrument is going to revolutionise the way scientists understand air quality and pollution, and it will make a meaningful difference in the everyday lives of people who are sensitive to air pollutants. We're thrilled to be able to contribute this important piece of technology to the mission, which will help keep the public informed with vital health information and provide a robust dataset for additional research purposes."

Built with Ball's expertise, Tempo was manufactured in adherence with the Geostationary Environment Monitoring Spectrometer (GEMS), launched earlier in 2020, which is already being utilised for similar purposes in South Korea's National Institute of Environmental Research.

Other than associates from Ball Aerospace, NASA has also included professionals from the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, a part of the Center for Astrophysics, Harvard & Smithsonian and NASA's Langley Research Center into the TEMPO team. The instrument has been embedded in an Intelsat 40e satellite delivered by Maxar.

Though Ball Corporation is mainly associated with USA's packaging sector, its subsidiary Ball Aerospace is breaking boundaries in developing innovative solutions for the space agencies and aviation sector. They are masters in creating precisely engineered lightweight aluminium alloy components for the aviation or space industry. Ball's technology is omnipresent in USA's industrial sector, and the company is now travelling through the earth's hemisphere to reach the vastness of space.