NASA’s second set of TROPICS cubesats launched Thursday evening (May 25), completing the agency’s hurricane-studying miniconstellation.
The two small satellites rise above a RocketLab Electron vehicle from the company’s Launch Complex 1 on New Zealand’s North Island on Thursday at 11:46 pm EDT (0346 GMT on May 26).
Electron placed the cubesat pair as planned about 34 minutes after liftoff, Rocket Lab confirmed via Twitter.
The launch was originally targeted for midnight EDT (0400 GMT) on Thursday, but Rocket Lab pushed it back almost 24 hours due to bad weather.
The launch, dubbed “Coming to a Storm Near You,” is the second Rocket Lab has done for TROPICS programwhose name is short for “Time-Resolved Observations of Precipitation Structure and Storm Intensity with the Constellation of Small Sats.”
Related: Facts about Rocket Lab’s Electron rocket
Payload deployment confirmed! Congratulations to the launch team on our 37th Electron launch, and to our mission partners at @NASA @NASA_LSP @NASAAmes: the TROPICS constellation is officially in orbit! pic.twitter.com/xAy7ltg7m1May 26, 2023
Rocket Lab’s previous TROPICS launch, dubbed “Rocket Like a Hurricane,” sent two cubesats of a four-spacecraft constellation into low Earth orbit on May 7. It is expected that the four satellites will all be operational in time for the start of the 2023 hurricane season in North America.
“The number of hurricanes we experience each year is increasing due to climate changeand the intensity of these storms is also increasing,” said Jane McNichol, mission manager at Rocket Lab, at a prelaunch press conference on May 7.
“The current technology we have in orbit to monitor storm progress can only check in on these storms every two hours, but within that time, we may see a slight increase in storm intensity, ” he added.
McNichol said TROPICS will be investigating severe tropical storms in terms of precipitation, temperature and humidity almost every hour. Such data has the potential to save lives and livelihoods, he stressed.
The TROPICS cubesats sit in a unique low Earth orbit over the tropical regions of the planet. Their orbit is tilted in such a way that they can travel through any given storm about once an hour.
The quick refresh of microwave measurements that TROPICS will make is a big help, NASA officials said. Current weather monitoring satellites can make similar measurements, but only once every six hours.
“Providing more frequent imaging will not only improve our situational awareness when a storm develops,” Karen St. Germain, director of the Earth Science Division at NASA Headquarters in Washington, said in a statement earlier this month. “The data will inform models that will help us determine how a hurricane changes over time, which in turn helps to improve forecasts from our partners like the National Hurricane Center and the Joint Typhoon Warning Center .”
Rocket Lab is the second company to launch TROPICS cubesats. The first, the California-based Astra, attempted to loft two of them in June 2022, but its rocket developed an anomaly during flight and lost the cubesats. NASA has selected Rocket Lab to launch the remaining four TROPICS craft on two missions.
Those two flights were originally scheduled to launch from Rocket Lab’s US site, the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport at NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia, later this year. But the location was moved to the New Zealand site so that the four TROPICS cubesats could take off earlier and be ready for Northern Hemisphere hurricane season.
The TROPICS constellation orbits Earth at an altitude of about 342 miles (550 kilometers) with an inclination of about 30 degrees. All four units in the constellation must be deployed within 60 days for it to be effective.
“The ability to advance our understanding of tropical cyclones from space is limited by the ability to make frequent measurements, especially from microwave instruments that look at hurricanes,” said Will McCarty, program scientist. for the TROPICS Mission, in a statement on April 10. “Historically, satellites have been too large and expensive to provide observations at a time frequency consistent with the timescales over which tropical cyclones can develop.”
McCarty added that the cubesat era has allowed for smaller, cheaper satellites, allowing for the design of a constellation that optimizes the scientific utility of the mission and facilitates the cheap launch.
“These factors allow TROPICS to provide a new understanding of tropical cyclones by reducing the time in which a given cyclone is revisited by satellites,” he said.
Editor’s note: This story was updated at 9:15 pm ET on May 24 with a new target launch time of 11:30 pm EDT on May 25, then again at 1 am ET on May 26 with news of a successful launch and satellite deployment.
