The primary two satellites in NASA’s recent hurricane-hunting constellation have taken to the skies.
The 2 cubesats, the founding members of the agency’s TROPICS network, launched today (May 7) atop a Rocket Lab Electron rocket, which lifted off from the corporate’s Recent Zealand site at 9 p.m. EDT (0100 GMT and 1 p.m. on May 8 local Recent Zealand time).
About 33 minutes after liftoff, the Electron deployed the shoebox-sized TROPICS cubesats into low Earth orbit, about 340 miles (550 kilometers) above Earth.
Related: Facts about Rocket Lab’s Electron rocket
The TROPICS constellation (short for “Time-Resolved Observations of Precipitation Structure and Storm Intensity with a Constellation of Smallsats”) will consist of 4 cubesats in low Earth orbit.
Rocket Lab will launch the opposite two satellites about two weeks from now, if all goes in keeping with plan. (For the constellation to operate properly, all 4 TROPICS satellites have to be deployed inside a same 60-day period.)
The TROPICS cubesats will measure the hour-by-hour formation and progression of tropical cyclones and hurricanes with enhanced specificity.
“We’ll be getting data that we have never had before, which is that this ability to look within the microwave wavelength region within the storms, with hourly cadence to have a look at the storm because it forms and intensifies,” TROPICS principal investigator Bill Blackwell said during a prelaunch press conference on April 28. “We hope to enhance our understanding of the fundamental processes that drive the storms, and ultimately improve our ability to forecast and track intensity.”
Researchers for the TROPICS program in NASA’s Earth Science Division, similar to Will McCarty, see missions like TROPICS as a part of an innovation leap to enhance much heftier, weather-focused satellites.
“It is the cubesat revolution,” McCarty told reporters in the course of the April 28 press conference. “In complementing the larger weather satellites, we’re also getting some recent innovation as well in these tiny compact sizes … These cubesats are concerning the size of a loaf of bread. So I would love to emphasize the innovation on this mission.”
Rocket Lab boasts the power to launch from two very different parts of the planet; it also has a site on the the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport (MARS) in Virginia. Each TROPICS missions were originally slated to fly from MARS but were shifted to Recent Zealand to reap the benefits of an earlier launch date.
The change allows the constellation to be up and running before the start of the 2023 hurricane season within the Northern Hemisphere, which officially begins within the Eastern Pacific on May 15. The shift in launch sites got here at no significant extra cost to NASA or Rocket Lab.
“The work was relatively trivial,” Rocket Lab CEO Peter Beck said in the course of the April 28 press conference. “We’ll do whatever we want to do to be sure that we are able to deliver those spacecraft for the storm season, and on this case that meant getting them all the way down to Recent Zealand.”
The TROPICS constellation was originally planned to consist of six satellites. Nevertheless, the primary two cubesats were lost when their rocket ride, provided by California company Astra, failed during launch in June 2022.
NASA then chosen Rocket Lab to launch the remaining 4 satellites.
Should the second Rocket Lab mission experience any anomalies on its method to orbit, the TROPICS constellation won’t be useless.
“If we only get one in every of the 2 [launches] and we still have two satellites, there’s still loads to learn from these data,” McCarty said in the course of the April 28 press call, adding that the TROPICS remark cadence could be slowed if only two cubesats ended up making it to orbit.
Rocket Lab has been working to make the Electron’s first stage reusable, recovering boosters on several previous flights. No recovery operations were performed today, nevertheless.