WASHINGTON — NASA chosen Rocket Lab to launch a pair of cubesats in 2024 to watch energy entering and exiting the polar regions of the planet.
NASA announced Aug. 14 it awarded a task order through its Enterprise-class Acquisition of Dedicated and Rideshare (VADR) contract to Rocket Lab for the launch of two 6U cubesats for the Polar Radiant Energy within the Far-InfraRed Experiment, or PREFIRE mission.
The NASA announcement didn’t disclose the worth of the duty order. The agency stated in past awards done under VADR that the pricing is taken into account “proprietary” since the awards are competed in a closed environment, with only corporations on the VADR contract eligible to bid on launches of taxpayer-funded missions.
The announcement, though, was extraordinarily vague for even a VADR task order. It didn’t disclose the launch vehicle, variety of launches or launch dates for the PREFIRE satellites. A separate announcement by Rocket Lab did state that the 2 satellites will probably be launched individually on Electron rockets from the corporate’s Launch Complex 1 in Latest Zealand in May 2024.
Rocket Lab didn’t disclose the worth of the PREFIRE task order. Nonetheless, the corporate said in an Aug. 8 earnings call that it had a goal selling price for the Electron of $7.5 million this 12 months. An earlier task order under VADR for 2 Electron launches of the TROPICS storm-monitoring cubesats had a price of $12.99 million, based on procurement databases.
The corporate said that the necessities of the mission, including placement in 525-kilometer circular polar orbits with specific values for an orbital parameter often known as local time of the ascending node, or LTAN, required dedicated Electron launches. Each satellites must even be launched closely together to perform the mission, which the corporate demonstrated with the TROPICS launches slightly greater than two weeks apart in May.
The 2 cubesats will measure energy entering and exiting the Earth, particularly within the polar regions where there is proscribed data. Each spacecraft carries a far-infrared spectrometer, derived from an instrument flown on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft, to measure infrared fluxes between 5 and 54 microns.
The mission’s website notes that the cubesats will provide the primary measurements of far infrared (FIR) emissions, at wavelengths longer than 15 microns, which constitute the vast majority of energy emitted from polar regions. “It fills a significant gap in our knowledge of the Arctic energy budget and the role of FIR radiation in Arctic warming, sea ice loss, ice sheet melt, and sea level rise,” it states.
NASA chosen PREFIRE in 2018 as a part of its Earth Enterprise line of missions and instruments, with an estimated cost of $33 million. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory is handling project management and instrument development for the mission, with Tristan L’Ecuyer of the University of Wisconsin serving as principal investigator.