WASHINGTON — NASA has chosen SpaceX to launch a pair of smallsats to check space weather as a part of a rideshare mission in 2025.
NASA announced Sept. 29 that it awarded SpaceX a task order to launch the Tandem Reconnection and Cusp Electrodynamics Reconnaissance Satellites (TRACERS), a pair of smallsats that may study space weather and the magnetosphere from low Earth orbit.
NASA chosen TRACERS in 2019 as a heliophysics Small Explorer, or SMEX, mission, with a price of not more than $115 million. On the time it was planned to launch as a secondary payload with one other SMEX mission, the Polarimeter to Unify the Corona and Heliosphere (PUNCH). In August 2022, though, NASA said that PUNCH would fly on the identical Falcon 9 as an agency astrophysics mission, the Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Re-ionization, and Ices Explorer (SPHEREx) in 2025.
The NASA announcement of the TRACERS launch didn’t state how the spacecraft would launch aside from on a Falcon 9, and didn’t provide a launch date. NASA spokesperson Leejay Lockhart said Sept. 29 that TRACERS can be the first payload of a rideshare mission going to sun-synchronous orbit no sooner than April 2025.
As with past awards made through the Enterprise Class Acquisition of Dedicated and Rideshare (VADR) contract, NASA declined to state the worth of the duty order, saying that such information is “competition sensitive information” that would affect bids on future task orders. In keeping with a government procurement database, NASA added $3.593 million to SpaceX’s VADR contract Sept. 26, but didn’t explicitly link it to the TRACERS task order.
Once placed into sun-synchronous orbit, the 2 spacecraft will perform repeated crossings of the polar cusp of the Earth’s magnetosphere, as field lines bend right down to the north and south poles, studying the interactions often known as magnetic reconnection between the solar wind and terrestrial magnetosphere.
The mission is led by David Miles of the University of Iowa, who took over as principal investigator after the death in August of Craig Kletzing, also of the University of Iowa. The spacecraft are being built by Millennium Space Systems.