Authors: Marisela Rosales, Rima Habre, Sina Hasheminassab, Dave Diner, Karen Yuen
In July, NEXUS MPI Rima Habre, ScD, MSc of USC participated in the Science Team Meeting and Early Adopter Workshop for the Multi-Angle Imager for Aerosols (MAIA) mission, for which she serves as the Mission Applications Advisor.
The MAIA mission is a multifaceted collaboration between the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the Italian Space Agency (ASI) under NASA’s Earth System Science Pathfinder Program. The goal of the MAIA mission is to understand how different types of particulate air pollution affect human health in globally distributed metropolitan areas. MAIA is the first competitively-selected NASA mission with a primary goal of benefiting societal health and the first NASA satellite mission developed in direct partnership with epidemiologists and health organizations.
To achieve this goal, MAIA will integrate observations from the JPL-built satellite instrument, planned for launch in 2027-2028, with a currently operational network of surface-based air pollution monitors and atmospheric modeling system to produce daily, 1-km maps of PM concentrations and composition across 12 metropolitan areas in North America, South America, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and Asia, supporting epidemiologic studies and other applications.
The four-day MAIA Science Team Meeting and Early Adopter Workshop, hosted at Caltech in Pasadena, California, opened with mission updates from the JPL Principal Investigator, David J. Diner, Project Manager, Kevin A. Burke, and Project Systems Engineer, Stacey W. Boland. Throughout the meeting, members of the MAIA Science Team shared updates on algorithms development, integration and modeling systems, product generation, surface monitoring results, and scientific applications and partnerships. The meeting promoted meaningful discussions and opportunities to learn about mission progress while exploring opportunities to implement future MAIA data in public health science.
To help synergize collaborations between the MAIA science community and the Health and Extreme Weather (HEW) community, Aubrey K. Miller, M.D., MPH, Senior Medical Advisor, co-chair of the HEW program, and Director of the Disaster Research Response Network at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) presented on National Institutes of Health (NIH) efforts to integrate geospatial and health data in support of national research priorities. His presentation highlighted current use cases and opportunities for leveraging MAIA data to address human health.
On the final day of the meeting, the JPL Mission Applications Lead, Karen Yuen, M.A., led the Early Adopter Workshop providing attendees with applications and tutorials on where to access and how to use MAIA data for exposure and health applications. MAIA’s Deputy Principal Investigator at JPL, Sina Hasheminassab, PhD, shared updates on the MAIA ground-based air pollution monitoring network and guided attendees through a tutorial of the MAIA Geographic Information Visualization Tool (GIVT). The GIVT is an excellent resource to learn more about MAIA target areas and to explore the extensive PM speciation ground measurement data being compiled, and additional geospatial layers, to support air quality modeling and health research worldwide.
The Early Adopters Workshop concluded with a presentation from Rima Habre, ScD, MSc, highlighting open research questions and applications where MAIA efforts and data products can help advance the fields of exposure science and air quality epidemiology in the U.S. and internationally. These include enabling building exposure models in new areas, enhancing global air quality monitoring coverage especially in under-monitored areas, and supporting data needs of national cohort studies like All of Us, ECHO, and ABCD. The Early Adopter Workshop provided both the MAIA Science Team and prospective users with insights into MAIA’s future data products and potential applications in environmental health research.
