Dust: it's coarse and rough and irritating — and it gets everywhere.
Blown by wind across continents and oceans, dust does more than make skies hazy, congest lungs, and leave a film on windshields—it can influence weather, hasten snowmelt, and fertilize plants on land and in the ocean. Particles from North Africa can travel thousands of miles around the globe, sparking phytoplankton blooms, seeding Amazonian rainforests with nutrients, and blanketing some American cities in a veil of grit while also absorbing and scattering sunlight.
Our Earth Surface Mineral Dust Source Investigation (EMIT) mission set to launch next month aims to help us better understand how these drifting intercontinental dusts affect our planet. Currently, we are unsure whether mineral dust heats or cools our planet: for instance, specks of dust in lighter colors may reflect sunlight back into space, cooling our planet, while darker particles may absorb solar energy and heat Earth. As climate change causes more lands to become dry and arid dust-forming regions, we need to better understand how they impact our future climate.
Once in orbit, EMIT will be attached to the exterior of the @iss pointing towards Earth. There, it will use its imaging spectrometer to measure light across hundreds of wavelengths, including those that are invisible to human eyes. These spectrometer readings will help us understand the mineral composition of large dust plumes and better prepare us for our changing climate.
Credit: NASA
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