How can small satellites improve the health of citizens in equatorial countries and Singapore in a context of climate change?

• Main Author: Lim, Yin Qi
• Other Authors: Erick Lansard
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: Nanyang Technological University 2024
• Subjects: Engineering; Satellite; Remote sensing
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/176839
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Human health is greatly affected by our environment, especially climate. Studies have shown worsening health due to climate change. This includes heat waves which lead to heat-induced death as well as illness and diseases. In order to improve health, we focus on the cause of the intense heat waves that occur more often over the years - human activities, such as burning. Human activities lead to increased greenhouse gases (GHG) and air pollutants in the atmosphere, which not only cause global warming to intensify but also leads to other illnesses and diseases of the lung and heart. To further improve human health, we explore the usefulness of satellite remote sensing to compensate for limited coverage of ground- and air-based sampling. We identify important missions related to GHG and PM such as, CO2M, MAIA, PACE and GAPMAP, that would be flying by 2025. Through identifying the data gaps of these planned missions, we propose launching a small satellite at NEqLEO with a GAPMAP-like instrument. This allows an improvement of revisit along Equator and creates good synergy with the future planned missions flying. With these, we hope that it will help researchers gain new insights to the effects of PM on human health, which will in turn become actionable information to improve health.