EMIT: Earth Surface Mineral Dust Source Investigation
EMIT, to be launched to the International Space Station,
will be the first instrument to use NASA-invented
imaging spectroscopy technology to comprehensively measure
the mineral composition of
the Earth's arid land dust source regions.
EMIT Media Reel May 12, 2022 TRT 4:56
[list of animations, work on EMIT instrument, and
interviews: Principal Investigator,
Deputy Principal Investigator,
and Instrument Scientist.]
[Animation of EMIT instrument located on the ISS]
[silent]
[Animation of ISS above Bodélé Depression in Chad]
[silent]
[Animation of ISS above Australia]
[silent]
[Artist's concept: EMIT's imaging spectrometer
collecting data above Southern California]
[silent]
[ambient noise in clean room]
[preparation for vibration testing at NASA's JPL]
[ambient noise in clean room]
[EMIT instrument integration at NASA's JPL]
[ambient noise in clean room]
[EMIT in final configuration undergoing vibration testing]
[Principal Investigator Robert Green, JPL]
So EMIT is simply looking at the arid land regions
of planet Earth
and understanding the mineral composition
of those regions.
In these arid land regions, under conditions of high wind,
mineral dust is emitted or launched into the atmosphere
and can travel thousands of miles
where it interacts throughout the Earth system.
In our case we're going to study how that mineral dust
heats or cools planet Earth.
Currently, we aren't sure whether mineral dust
heats the planet or cools the planet
in the lower atmosphere.
Some minerals are dark, may be more red.
They would absorb solar energy.
And they could be heating elements.
In other cases minerals are bright, white
like kaolilnite, carbonate
and they could reflect sunlight back into space
and cool the atmosphere.
This is a unique type of instrument, invented at JPL.
And what's special about it is: it collects an image
but for every point of that image it collects
a full spectrum, a lot of wavelengths.
So we can actually understand the chemistry
of what we're observing
in the atmosphere and in the surface
and make these quantitative measurements,
in the case of EMIT, about what minerals are present there
based on their spectral signatures.
[Deputy Principal Investigator, Natalie Mahowald, Cornell U.]
I think we're going to be focusing on arid regions
of the planet. And
it's not an insignificant part of the planet is arid.
You can just think of the Sahara,
the whole of North Africa.
Much of it is/isn't a really good desert dust source.
But there's other regions as well. Moving across
the Middle East, into Asia, central Asia and east Asia,
as well as in the western United States.
You can also think that South American and South Africa
have desert dust sources.
Basically the only way to sample across all of these deserts
is to use remote sensing.
And so this experiment is so important
for us to understand
what's going on at the surface of the Earth
in terms of the mineralogy and the composition.
[Instrument Scientist, David Thompson, JPL]
We're going to launch on SpaceX rockets
that will go to the International Space Station.
There's a Dragon vehicle
that contains EMIT in its trunk.
And the robotic Space Station arm
will pluck EMIT out of the trunk and then install it
in its place on the Space Station.
EMIT is an imaging spectrometer
which means-- well, it combines two words:
imaging and spectrometer.
So the spectrometer part means that it measures light
in many different wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum.
Our eyes see three wavelengths: red, green, and blue.
But EMIT sees in hundreds of wavelengths
out into the infrared.
The imaging part means that we acquire these data
at every point within an image.
So you can think of it like a camera
except instead of just seeing red, green, and blue
our camera sees throughout the electromagnetic spectrum.