Firefly Aerospace has secured a contract for a dedicated Alpha launch that will transport satellites for NASA’s Investigation of Convective Updrafts mission, which studies how and why tropical storms form.
The Firefly rocket will launch out of the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport at NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility and will be the Texas company’s third Alpha launch for NASA. The company’s first successful Alpha launch happened last summer and the second is scheduled to take off from Vandenberg Space Force Base next year.
Firefly noted that the company’s Alpha rocket series was specifically designed to support missions like INCUS.
“This allows our customers to place their satellites in the exact orbit they need and use their mission-critical resources to immediately begin conducting research and making advancements in science,” Firefly CEO Jason Kim said in a statement.
The INCUS mission will deploy three satellites, all of which will record data on how tropical storms form, evolve, and eventually dissipate. The satellites will also be equipped with highly sensitive precipitation radar systems that track cloud density and intensity.
NASA stated that the satellites will be flying in close coordination, allowing for more detailed readings as they monitor massive storms.
“By flying so closely together, the satellites will use the slight differences in when they make observations to apply a novel time-differencing approach to estimate the vertical transport of convective mass,” NASA wrote of the mission.
