Joint-Effort Satellite by NASA and Italian Space Agency to Monitor Air Pollution In World’s Most Populous Cities

With almost the entire global population susceptible to the damaging effects of toxic aerosols, it is imperative that we develop means to adequately track air pollutants and gauge their impact on human health.

Keeping this goal in mind, NASA has partnered with the Italian space agency Agenzia Spaziale Italiana (ASI) to build and launch the Multi-Angle Imager for Aerosols (MAIA). This first-of-its-kind mission, which will also include epidemiologists and public health organisations, is designed to study the health impacts of tiny pollutants over some of the world's most populous cities.

Set to be launched before the end of 2024, this observatory would have two major components — ASI's PLATiNO-2 satellite and NASA's science instrument equipped with a "pointable spectropolarimetric camera" to capture images of airborne particles at different spectral wavelengths.

While orbiting 740 kilometres above Earth's surface, MAIA will focus on 11 primary target areas: New Delhi, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Boston, Rome, Addis Ababa, Barcelona, Beijing, Johannesburg, Taipei and Tel Aviv.

In addition, the mission will also collect data pertaining to atmospheric particles over 30 secondary target areas worldwide, using the MAIA observatory, ground sensors and atmospheric models.

Thereafter, researchers will correlate the findings with the birth death, and hospitalisation records to determine whether exposure to various pollutants (such as black carbon, sulphates and nitrates) impacts human health differently.

Breathing tainted air is linked to a multitude of health risks, including asthma, lung cancer, heart attacks, stroke and even adverse birth outcomes in infants. But how the toxicity of diverse pollutant mixtures impacts us is not clearly understood.

With the primary objective to study how short-, medium- and long-term exposure to different airborne particles affects human health, the MAIA mission may provide crucial insights that would inform sound public health policy, aiding humanity for years to come.

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