NASA launches EMIT to study an increasingly dusty world

July 15 () –

Designed to analyze dust in the air and see how it might affect the weather, NASA’s EMIT mission It has been launched this July 14 to the International Space Station.

Every year, strong winds carry more than a billion metric tons, or the weight of 10,000 aircraft carriers, of mineral dust from Earth’s deserts and other dry regions through the atmosphere. While scientists know that dust affects the environment and climate, do not have enough data to determine, in detail, what those effects are or may be in the futureat least not yet.

NASA’s EMIT (Earth Surface Mineral Dust Source Investigation) will help fill those knowledge gaps. EMIT’s next-generation imaging spectrometer, developed by the agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, will collect more than a billion compositional measurements from dust sources around the world over the course of a year, and in doing so, significantly advance scientists’ understanding of the influence of dust throughout the Earth system, reports NASA.

EMIT, transported to the orbital complex between the supplies of a Dragon supply freighter, will identify the composition of mineral dust in the Earth’s arid regions, clarify whether this mineral dust warms or cools the planet, and help scientists understand how dust affects the different processes of the Earth. Taken together, your data will improve the precision of how future climate scenarios will affect the type and amount of dust in our atmosphere.

As global temperatures rise, arid regions can become even drier, possibly resulting in larger (and dustier) deserts. The extent to which this could happen depends on a number of factors, including how much temperatures rise, how land use changes and how rainfall trends change.

By incorporating EMIT’s global dust source composition data into models and predictions, scientists will gain a better understanding of how the amount and composition of dust in arid regions They can change under different climates.