LOGAN, Utah — A quartet of cubesats launched in May to watch the event of tropical storm systems is working just in time to support monitoring of the Atlantic hurricane season.
4 cubesats for NASA’s Time-Resolved Observations of Precipitation structure and storm Intensity with a Constellation of Smallsats (TROPICS) mission launched on a pair of Rocket Lab Electron rockets May 7 and May 25. The satellites have been undergoing tests of their important instruments, microwave radiometers to gather temperature and humidity data on tropical storms.
For the reason that launches, the mission has been working to calibrate and validate the info from those instruments, said William Blackwell, principal investigator for TROPICS at MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory, during a presentation on the Small Satellite Conference here Aug. 5. “We’re within the throes of getting the constellation optimized for hurricane season,” he said, with data available to most people inside a pair months.
Initial evaluation of the info from the 4 satellites is promising, in addition to observations from a prototype satellite, TROPICS Pathfinder, launched in 2021. “It’s working similar to we hoped it will work,” he said of information from the older satellite. “We’ve got some really high-quality data of a number of tropical cyclones.”
Satellites have flown microwave instruments for many years, but typically on large satellites that may only revisit storms every several hours. The four-satellite TROPICS constellation, in orbits inclined at 33 degrees optimized for the tropical storm belt, can revisit weather systems every hour.
“This is basically a transformative mission,” he said, as an hourly revisit rate can higher track the dynamics of storm systems as they form and evolve. “That is the primary high-revisit-rate microwave observations of tropical cyclones that we’ve ever had.”
Along with the high frequency of observations, the TROPICS satellites provide high-quality data. Blackwell said the precipitation rain rate estimate derived from TROPICS Pathfinder data is healthier than state-of-the-art instruments on much larger spacecraft.
The TROPICS constellation is the results of greater than a decade of labor to develop small microwave instruments that might fit on cubesats. That included several demonstration missions to check radiometers that operate in 12 bands but could still fit inside a single cubesat unit, a part of a 3U cubesat.
The constellation overcame a setback in June 2022 when two cubesats were lost in an Astra Rocket 3.3 launch failure. After Astra withdrew Rocket 3.3 from the market, NASA awarded a contract to Rocket Lab to launch the remaining 4 satellites. NASA has not announced plans to construct any additional TROPICS satellites but said that the mission can still achieve its science goals with 4 spacecraft.
Blackwell said the TROPICS technology is now being transferred to the private sector. Tomorrow.io plans to make use of microwave radiometers based on TROPICS for its constellation of 18 cubesats that can collect weather data.