Overview
Geostationary Environment Monitoring Spectrometer
Our GEMS instrument, which launched in 2020, is helping to improve early warnings for dangerous concentrations of chemicals in our atmosphere across the Asia-Pacific region.
A geostationary scanning ultraviolet-visible spectrometer, GEMS is monitoring trans-boundary nitrogen dioxide, sulfur dioxide, glyoxyl, formaldehyde, ozone and aerosols for the Korean peninsula and Asia-Pacific region. The instrument monitors dust and helps us understand how particles in the air effect human health and public safety.
What We Did
We built GEMS under a commercial contract with the Korea Aerospace Research Institute (KARI) for the National Institute of Environmental Research in the Ministry of Environment of South Korea. Together, BAE Systems and KARI engineers designed, fabricated and tested the GEMS instrument. Integrated onto KARI's GEO-KOMPSAT-2B satellite, GEMS launched successfully on February 18, 2020.
GEMS was built in tandem with the Tropospheric Emissions: Monitoring of Pollution (TEMPO) spectrometer. We built TEMPO for NASA Langley Research Center and Harvard Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory. Both GEMS and TEMPO leverage our know-how and the tech we’ve developed for earlier ultraviolet-visible instruments.
Tropospheric Emissions: Monitoring of Pollution
The TEMPO instrument, a geostationary ultraviolet/visible spectrometer, is providing hourly daylight measurements of ozone, nitrogen dioxide, sulfur dioxide and other pollutants across North America, spanning from Mexico City to Northern Canada and coast to coast. This data will advance the research of chemical concentrations in our atmosphere by determining how these particulates impact weather patterns and human health on a continental scale.
TEMPO launched in April 2023 from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. It is hosted on Intelsat 40e, a commercial satellite, and is making observations from a geostationary vantage point, about 22,000 miles above Earth’s equator.
What We Did
TEMPO’s high resolution is allowing aerosol tracking at micro urban scales (an area approximating 1.25 x 2.8 miles) every hour and is expected to improve weather prediction accuracy by 50 percent. The instrument was developed under a firm, fixed-price contract.
Collaboration Across the Industry
In addition to BAE Systems, the TEMPO team includes the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory — part of the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian — and NASA's Langley Research Center. The team prepared for TEMPO data through airborne flights using our GeoTASO instrument, a UV-Visible sensor designed to deliver hyperspectral data similar to that expected from TEMPO. GeoTASO data helped the TEMPO team test and refine their trace gas and aerosol retrieval approaches.
News
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