Science.-NASA Launches EMIT to Study a World Growing Dust

Madrid, 15 years old (Europe Press)

Each year, strong winds carry more than 1 billion metric tons, or the weight of 10,000 aircraft carriers, of mineral dust from Earth’s deserts and other dry areas through the atmosphere. While scientists know that dust affects the environment and climate, they don’t have enough data to determine in detail what these effects are or might be in the future, at least not yet.

EMIT (Investigation of the Source of Mineral Surface Dust) will help fill in these knowledge gaps. EMIT’s Next Generation Imaging Spectrometer, developed by the agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, will collect more than 1 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 impact of dust throughout the Earth system, NASA says. .

Transferred to the orbital complex between the Dragon cargo ship’s supply, EMIT will determine the composition of mineral dust in Earth’s arid regions, clarify whether this mineral dust is warming or cooling the planet, and help scientists understand how dust affects various processes from Earth. Taken together, your data will improve the accuracy of how future climate scenarios affect the type and amount of dust in our atmosphere.

As global temperatures rise, arid regions can become drier, which can lead to larger (and dustier) deserts. How likely this can happen depends on several factors, including how much temperatures are rising, how land use is changing, and how rainfall trends are changing.

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 changes in arid regions under different climates.