NASA Instrument Reveals New Ability to Gather Nighttime Light Data - The Latest in NASA Science News

Clusters of light across North America as observed by the TEMPO instrument in February 2025. This false-color image represents the total light observed from that location, with red being the brightest. The TEMPO instrument observes more than 2,000 wavelengths of light at each location.

NASA

NASA’s Tropospheric Emissions: Monitoring of Pollution instrument, or TEMPO, is known for measuring trace gases like nitrogen dioxide, ozone, and formaldehyde in the air we breathe. Now TEMPO has a new trick. It can see in the dark.

Since launching in 2023, TEMPO data has set a record at the Atmospheric Science Data Center (ASDC) for most mission data downloads by users in a single year – more than 2 million gigabytes. Located at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, ASDC provides mission data to the public. The TEMPO instrument requires daylight for its primary mission, collecting trace gases. But researchers have been testing a new capability: using the instrument to observe nighttime lights.

Low-light spectroscopic observations of the Earth at night are providing researchers unique insights into the composition of nighttime lights and their effects on people’s daily lives. City lights, nightglow, aurorae, moonlit clouds, gas flares, and lightning are all examples of what TEMPO can observe after the sun sets. This additional capability is the topic of a study recently published in the American Geophysical Union’s Earth and Space Sciences Journal. Researchers at Carr Astronautics Corporation collaborated with NASA and the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, which oversees daily operations of the TEMPO instrument, to demonstrate the value in TEMPO’s nighttime light data.

The study’s findings have implications for energy usage and light pollution, specifically their impacts on wildlife and human health. For example, TEMPO can help us understand a community’s levels of blue light, which is associated with the disruption of circadian rhythms. Additionally, TEMPO’s newly discovered night-vision capabilities show potential for developing future operational sensors tailored to analyzing both city lights and moonlight for use in disaster monitoring and response at night, and weather forecasting.

For more information about the TEMPO instrument and mission, visit: https://science.nasa.gov/mission/tempo/

~ Charles Hatfield 

Source: NASA Instrument Reveals New Ability to Gather Nighttime Light Data - NASA Science