Paris, 1 March 2021. – NASA has chosen Astra House to launch the company’s TROPICS mission, NASA mentioned.
TROPICS stands for Time-Resolved Observations of Precipitation Construction and Storm Depth and consists of a constellation of six CubeSats that may assist scientific research of storms and storm processes.
The launch service contract for the TROPICS mission is a firm-fixed-price contract valued at $7.95 million, NASA mentioned. NASA’s Launch Providers Program on the company’s Kennedy House Heart in Florida will handle the launch service.
The CubeSats, every the dimensions of a shoebox, will present rapid-refresh microwave measurements that can be utilized to find out temperature, strain, and humidity inside hurricanes as they kind and evolve, the U.S. company defined. The mission’s high-revisit imaging and sounding observations are enabled by microwave know-how developed on the Massachusetts Institute of Know-how’s Lincoln Laboratory.
The TROPICS mission is focused for launch between eight January and 31 July 2022 from the corporate’s launch website on the Kwajalein Atoll within the Marshall Islands.