Each 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 into the atmosphere. While scientists know that dust affects the environment and climate, they don’t have enough data to determine what those effects are or maybe in the future – at least not yet.
NASA’s Earth Surface Mineral Dust Source Investigation (EMIT)
mission will help fill in those knowledge gaps. EMIT is scheduled to launch
from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida on June 10, 2022, as part of
SpaceX’s 25th commercial resupply services mission for NASA.
Live coverage of the launch of SpaceX’s resupply mission for NASA will begin at 10 a.m. EDT (14:00 UTC) on June 10 and will air on the agency’s website, as well as YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitch, Daily Motion, Theta.TV, and NASA’s App.
EMIT will use an imaging spectrometer developed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory to help scientists understand the effects of airborne minerals and dust particles as they move through our planet’s atmosphere. Data from EMIT will allow scientists to create a new mineral map of Earth’s dry and dust-producing regions, which will provide information about the regional and global heating and cooling effects of mineral dust today and in the future. The EMIT instrument will observe Earth from outside the International Space Station.
SpaceX’s cargo mission will carry EMIT and other science investigations to the space station aboard a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft atop a Falcon 9 rocket.
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