Upcoming Mission
INCUS
Mission Details
Mission Summary
Firefly was awarded another NASA Venture-Class Acquisition of Dedicated and Rideshare (VADR) contract to launch the agency’s Investigation of Convective Updrafts (INCUS) spacecraft on Firefly’s Alpha rocket. As part of NASA’s Earth System Science Pathfinder program, INCUS is a NASA Earth Venture-Mission with three satellites that will study why, when, and where tropical storms form to help advance climate change models. Following Firefly’s first NASA VCLS launch of eight CubeSats in 2024 and upcoming NASA VADR launch of the QuickSounder satellite in 2026, this mission will be Firefly’s third Alpha launch for NASA and first Alpha mission launching from the Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia.
Payloads
Firefly’s Alpha rocket will launch and deploy three NASA INCUS satellites that will fly in tight coordination to study the behavior of tropical storms and thunderstorms, including how storm systems form, evolve, and dissipate. Each satellite will have a high frequency precipitation radar that observes rapid changes in convective cloud depth and intensities. One of the three satellites also will carry a microwave radiometer to provide the spatial content of the larger scale weather observed by the radars. 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.
