PIA25429: NASA's EMIT Measures Surface Dust in North Africa, Europe, the Middle East, Central Asia
 Target Name:  Earth
 Is a satellite of:  Sol (our sun)
 Mission:  Earth Surface Mineral Dust Source Investigation (EMIT) 
 Spacecraft:  ISS
 Instrument:  EMIT 
 Product Size:  1489 x 1039 pixels (w x h)
 Produced By:  JPL
 Full-Res TIFF:  PIA25429.tif (4.643 MB)
 Full-Res JPEG:  PIA25429.jpg (393.1 kB)

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Original Caption Released with Image:

This image shows locations in parts of North Africa, Europe, the Middle East, and Central Asia observed by NASA's Earth Surface Mineral Dust Source Investigation (EMIT). Each blue box is a "scene" the instrument, which is aboard the International Space Station, has captured. The red box indicates where the instrument recently gathered data on three minerals in a location in southwest Libya, in the Sahara Desert.

Installed on the space station in July 2022, EMIT orbits Earth about once every 90 minutes to map the world's mineral-dust sources, gathering information about surface composition as the instrument completes about 16 orbits per day.

Over the course of its 12-month mission, EMIT will collect measurements of 10 important surface minerals – kaolinite, hematite, goethite, illite, vermiculite, calcite, dolomite, montmorillonite, chlorite, and gypsum – in arid regions between 50-degree south and north latitudes in Africa, Asia, North and South America, and Australia. The data EMIT collects will help scientists better understand the role of airborne dust particles in heating and cooling Earth's atmosphere on global and regional scales.

EMIT was developed at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which is managed for NASA by Caltech in Pasadena, California.

Image Credit:
NASA/JPL-Caltech

Image Addition Date:
2022-10-12