NASA has awarded Firefly Aerospace a launch service task order for the agency’s Investigation of Convective Updrafts, or INCUS, mission that seeks to study the formation of tropical storms.
The space agency said Tuesday it made the selection as part of the potential $300 million Venture-Class Acquisition of Dedicated and Rideshare, or VADR, contract.
Under the VADR contract, NASA works with 14 companies to provide launch services.
INCUS: Studying Storm Formation
NASA’s INCUS mission will deploy three SmallSats to better understand the formation of tropical convective storms by investigating the evolution of the vertical transport of air and water.
The agency said each satellite will be equipped with a high frequency precipitation radar to monitor rapid changes in convective cloud intensities and depth. One of the three spacecraft will transport and use a microwave radiometer to provide the spatial content of the larger scale weather that the radars will observe.
Susan van den Heever at Colorado State University is the principal investigator for INCUS, which is backed by several NASA centers, including Langley Research Center in Virginia and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California.
Blue Canyon Technologies and Tendeg will provide key components for the satellites.
Firefly’s Alpha Rocket to Launch INCUS
Firefly Aerospace will use its Alpha rocket to launch the INCUS mission as early as 2026 from the agency’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia.
“We strategically built our one metric ton Alpha rocket to support dedicated 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,” Jason Kim, CEO of Firefly Aerospace, said in a statement published Tuesday.
INCUS will be the company’s third Alpha rocket launch for NASA.
