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The goal of NASA’s Multi-Angle Imager for Aerosols (MAIA) mission is to understand how aerosols affect human health. Aerosols are tiny, microscopic particles that float in the air. While these particles are responsible for the beautiful red and pink colors we see during a sunset, aerosols such as dust and smoke can have detrimental health effects. Not only can breathing in air pollutants aggravate, or even cause, asthma and other respiratory issues, but chronic exposure to air pollution can also cause illnesses such as heart disease and lung cancer. Data from the MAIA mission will help scientists gain more understanding about how the tiny particles floating in our air are impacting our respiratory and physical health. The MAIA mission and instruments are based at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory/California Institute of Technology (JPL/Caltech) and will likely be launched in 2022.
Unlike other NASA missions, in which a satellite usually monitors quantities over the entire globe, the MAIA mission has specific locations, or “target areas,” it will study. These target areas are large metropolitan cities all over the globe that were identified as having large amounts of air pollution. The 12 Primary Target Areas (PTAs) were chosen because of their population, availability of health records, air pollution characteristics, availability of ground air monitor data, cloudiness, and geography. The 12 major cities chosen are Los Angeles, Atlanta, Boston, Barcelona, Rome, Johannesburg, Tel Aviv, Addis Ababa (Ethiopia), Delhi, Beijing, and Taipei. As the instrument passes over each of these areas, it will do multiple scans of the same location in order to get as much information as possible. Additionally, because of its sun-synchronous orbit, MAIA will pass over these cities at the same time every day. This feature will make monitoring long term changes easier than ever before.