The first satellite in NASA’s new hurricane-hunting constellation has taken to the skies.
The two cubes, founding members of the agency’s TROPICS network, were launched today (May 7) atop a Rocket Lab Electron rocket, which lifted off from the company’s site in New Zealand at 9 p.m. EDT (0100 GMT and 1 p.m. EST). on May 8, New Zealand local time).
About 33 minutes after liftoff, the electron deployed Tropics’ shoebox-sized cubes into low-Earth orbit, about 340 miles (550 kilometers) above Earth.
Related: Facts about Rocket Lab’s Electron rocket
The TROPICS constellation (short for “Temporalized Observations of Precipitation Structure and Storm Intensity with a Small Constellation of Satellites”) consists of four cubes in low Earth orbit.
Rocket Lab will launch the other two satellites about two weeks from now, if all goes according to plan. (For constellation to function properly, all four TROPICS satellites must be deployed within the same 60-day period.)
TROPICS cubesats will measure the formation and evolution of tropical cyclones and hurricanes hour by hour with enhanced specificity.
“We’ll have data that we didn’t have before, which is the ability to look in the microwave wavelength region of storms, with an hourly cadence to look at the storm as it forms and intensifies,” TROPICS principal investigator Bill Blackwell said during a pre-April 28 news conference. “We hope to improve our understanding of the underlying processes that drive storms, and ultimately improve our ability to predict and track their intensity.”
Tropics researchers in NASA’s Earth Sciences division, such as Will McCarty, see missions like Tropics as part of an innovative leap to increase heavy weather-focused satellites.
“It’s a cube revolution,” McCarty told reporters during an April 28 news conference. “In complementing the large weather satellites, we’re also getting some new innovations as well in these smaller, smaller sizes…these cubes are the size of a loaf of bread. So I’d really like to emphasize innovation in this mission.”
Rocket Lab prides itself on being able to launch from two very different parts of the planet; It also has a location at the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport (MARS) in Virginia. The two TROPICS missions were originally slated to fly from MARS but were moved to New Zealand to take advantage of the early launch date.
The change allows constellation to operate ahead of the start of the 2023 Northern Hemisphere hurricane season, which officially begins in the eastern Pacific Ocean on May 15. The shift in launch sites was not without significant additional cost to NASA or the Rocket Lab.
“The business was relatively trivial,” Rocket Lab CEO Peter Beck said during an April 28 press conference. “We’re going to do whatever we need to do to make sure we can deliver those spacecraft for storm season, and in this case that meant taking them to New Zealand.”
The TROPICS constellation was originally planned to consist of six satellites. However, the first two cubes were lost when their rocket flight, provided by Astra in California, failed during launch in June 2022.
NASA then selected Rocket Lab to launch the remaining four satellites.
If Rocket Lab’s second mission encounters an anomaly on its way into orbit, the TROPICS constellation won’t be useless.
“If we only get one of the two [launches] “We still have two satellites, there’s still a lot to learn from this data,” McCarty said during the April 28 press call, adding that the TROPICS monitoring tempo will slow if only two cubes end up in orbit.
Rocket Lab is working to make the Electron’s first stage reusable, restoring boosters on several previous flights. No refunds were made today, however.
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