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5 Things To Know About NASA’s New Mineral Dust Detector – Is It Good?


From NASA

Dust swirls on the Arabian Peninsula
Dust swirls over the Arabian Peninsula in this image taken by the Suomi NPP satellite in July 2018. NASA’s upcoming Earth Mineral Dust Source Survey (EMIT) will help scientists better understand The role of airborne dust in heating and cooling the atmosphere.
Credit: NASA Earth Observatory

Called EMIT, Investigating Earth’s Surface Mineral Dust Sources will analyze dust carried through the atmosphere from arid regions to see what effects it has on the planet.

Each year, strong winds carry more than a billion tons – or the weight of 10,000 aircraft carriers – of mineral dust from Earth’s deserts and other arid regions through the atmosphere. While scientists know that dust affects the environment and climate, they don’t have enough data to determine in detail what those effects are or likely to happen in the future – at least not yet.

Launched to the International Space Station on June 9, by NASA Investigate the source of mineral dust on the earth’s surface The tool (EMIT) will help fill those knowledge gaps. EMIT’s state-of-the-art imaging spectrometer, developed by the agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, will collect more than a billion measurements of dust source composition globally over the course of a year – and make Thus, significantly improving scientists’ understanding of the effects of dust on Earth system.

Here are five things to know about EMIT:

  1. It will determine the composition of mineral dust from arid regions of the Earth.

Desert regions produce most of the mineral dust that enters the atmosphere. They are also remote, making it difficult for scientists to collect soil and dust samples over these large areas by hand.

From its berth on the space station, EMIT will map mineral dust source areas around the world. The imaging spectrometer will also, for the first time, provide information on the color and composition of dust sources globally. This data will help scientists understand which dust is predominant in each region and improve their understanding of dust’s impact on the climate and Earth system today and in the future.

Using imaging spectrometer technology developed at JPL, EMIT will map the surface composition of minerals in dust-producing regions on Earth, helping climate scientists better understand the effects of the action of airborne dust particles in heating and cooling the Earth’s atmosphere. Vendor: NASA / JPL-Caltech

2. It will clarify whether the mineral dust is warming or cooling the planet.

Currently, scientists do not know whether mineral dust has a heating or cooling effect on the accumulated planet. That’s because dust particles in the atmosphere have different properties. For example, some seeds may be dark red, while others may be white.

Color is important because it determines whether the dust will absorb the Sun’s energy, like dark-colored minerals, or reflect it like light-colored minerals. If more dust absorbed the Sun’s energy than reflected it, it would warm the planet and vice versa.

EMIT will provide a detailed picture of how much dust comes from dark versus light minerals. That information will allow scientists to determine whether the dust is heating or cooling the planet as a whole, as well as regionally and locally.

  1. It will help scientists understand how dust affects various Earth processes.
Officials from NASA and JPL oversee the EMIT science instrument's vibration test
Officials from NASA and JPL oversaw the vibration testing of the EMIT science instrument, including the telescope and its imaging spectrometer.
Vendor: NASA / JPL-Caltech

Mineral dust particles have different colors because they are made of different substances. For example, dark red mineral dust has its color from iron. The composition of dust particles affects how they interact with many of the Earth’s natural processes.

For example, mineral dust plays a role in cloud formation and atmospheric chemistry. When mineral dust is deposited in oceans or forests, it can provide nutrients for growth, acting like fertilizer. When falling on snow or ice, the dust accelerates its melting, resulting in more water flowing. And for humans, mineral dust can be hazardous to health when inhaled.

EMIT will collect information on 10 important dust types, including those containing iron oxides, clays and carbonates. With this data, scientists will be able to accurately assess the effects of mineral dust on different ecosystems and processes.

2. Its data will improve the accuracy of climate models.

In the absence of more specific data, scientists now characterize mineral dust in climate models as yellow – the collective average of darkness and light. As a result, the effects that mineral dust could have on the climate – and that climate could have on mineral dust – were not evident in the computer samples.

The color and composition information collected by EMIT changes that. When instrument data is combined, the accuracy of climate models is improved.

3. It will help scientists predict how future climate scenarios will affect the type and amount of dust in our atmosphere.

As global temperatures rise, arid regions could become even drier, possibly leading to larger (and dustier) deserts. To what extent this can 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 might change over time. different climate and land use situations. They will also gain a better understanding of how these changes may affect future climate.

More information about the mission

EMIT is being developed at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which is managed for the agency by Caltech in Pasadena, California. It will launch from Kennedy Space Center in Florida to the International Space Station aboard SpaceX’s 25th commercial resupply service for NASA. Once EMIT becomes operational, its data will be transferred to NASA’s Distributed Archives of Land Process Activity (DAAC) for use by other researchers and the public.

To learn more about the mission, visit:

https://earth.jpl.nasa.gov/emit/



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