The two agencies are partnering on a satellite to understand the effects of different types of particle pollution on human health.
The two agencies are partnering on a satellite to understand the effects of different types of particle pollution on human health.
NASA and the Italian space agency Agenzia Spaziale Italiana (ASI) are partnering to build and launch the Multi-Angle Imager for Aerosols (MAIA) mission, an effort to investigate the health impacts of tiny airborne particles polluting some of the world’s most populous cities. MAIA marks the first NASA mission whose primary goal is to benefit societal health, as well as the first time epidemiologists and public health researchers have been directly involved in development of a satellite mission.
Set to launch before the end of 2024, the MAIA observatory will consist of a satellite known as PLATiNO-2 provided by ASI and a science instrument built at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. The mission will collect and analyze data from the observatory, sensors on the ground, and atmospheric models.
Those results will then be related to human birth, death, and hospitalization records to answer pressing questions about the health impacts of solid and liquid particles that contaminate the air we breathe. These particles, called aerosols, have been linked to respiratory diseases such as asthma and lung cancer, cardiovascular diseases such as heart attack and stroke, and adverse reproductive and birth outcomes, including premature birth and low infant birth weight.
Read more at NASA
Photo Credit: suhailsuri via Pixabay
