by NASA’s second set of TROPICS cubesats will launch on its hurricane study mission on Thursday (May 25), and you’ll be able to watch the action live.
The two tiny satellites are scheduled to take off from the top of a rocket lab Electric vehicle from the company’s Launch Complex 1 on New Zealand’s North Island, during a 70-minute window on Thursday that opens at midnight EDT (04:00 GMT).
The launch, dubbed “Coming to a Storm Near You,” is the second that Rocket Lab will perform for the TROPICS programwhose name is short for “Time-Resolved Observations of Rainfall Structure and Storm Intensity with a Constellation of Small Satellites”.
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Rocket Lab’s previous TROPICS launch, called “Rocket Like a Hurricane”, sent two cubesats from a planned constellation of four spacecraft into low Earth orbit. on may 7. The four satellites are all expected to be operational in time for the start of the 2023 hurricane season in North America.
“The number of hurricanes we face each year is increasing due to of Climate Changeand the intensity of these storms is also increasing,” Jane McNichol, Rocket Lab mission manager, said during a May 7 prelaunch press conference.
“The current technology that we have in orbit to monitor hurricane development may be able to check these storms every two hours, but within that time, we could see a storm increase greatly in intensity,” he added.
McNichol said TROPICS will investigate intense tropical storms in terms of precipitation, temperature and humidity nearly every hour. Such data has the potential to save lives and livelihoods, she emphasized.
TROPICS cubesats will be in a unique low earth orbit over the tropical regions of the planet. Their orbit is tilted such that they can travel over any storm about once an hour.
The fast-updating microwave measurements that TROPICS will make is a big boost, NASA officials said. Current weather tracking satellites can take similar measurements, but only once every six hours.
“Providing more frequent images will not only improve our situational awareness when a hurricane forms,” said Karen St. Germain, director of the Division of Earth Sciences at NASA Headquarters in Washington, in a statement earlier this month. “The data will inform models that will help us determine how a storm is changing over time, which in turn helps improve forecasts from our partners such as 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 launch two of them in June 2022, but its rocket suffered an in-flight anomaly and the cubesats were lost. NASA then selected Rocket Lab to launch the remaining four TROPICS spacecraft on two missions.
These two flights were originally scheduled to launch from Rocket Lab’s US site at the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport at NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia later this year. But the location was changed to the New Zealand location so that the four TROPICS cubesats could fly earlier and be ready for the Northern Hemisphere storm season.
The TROPICS constellation will orbit Earth at an altitude of about 342 miles (550 kilometers) with an inclination of about 30 degrees. All constellation units must be deployed within the same 60-day period.
“The ability to advance our understanding of tropical cyclones from space has been limited by the ability to make frequent measurements, particularly from microwave instruments that observe the storms,” said Will McCarty, program scientist for the TROPICS Mission, in a communicated. statement on April 10. “Historically, satellites have been too large and expensive to provide observations at a time frequency consistent with the timescales on which tropical cyclones can evolve.”
McCarty added that the cubesat era has allowed for smaller and cheaper satellites, allowing for a constellation design that optimizes the mission’s scientific utility and facilitates low-cost launches.
“These factors allow TROPICS to provide new understanding of tropical cyclones by shortening the time that a given storm is revisited by satellites,” he said.
