WASHINGTON – Astra has won a NASA contract to launch a small constellation of Earth cubes, while General Atomics has chosen Rocket Lab to launch a small satellite with a NOAA payload.
NASA announced on February 26 that it had awarded Astra a $ 7.95 million contract for three launches of the company’s Rocket 3 vehicle, which will be used to launch the agency’s Time-Resolved Observations of Precipitation Structure and Storm. Intensity with a Constellation of SmallSats (TROPICS). mission.
The three launches will take place over a period of 120 days between January 8 and July 31, 2022 from the Kwajalein Atoll on the Marshall Islands. It would be the first groundbreaking from Kwajalein since the last Falcon 1 launch, from Omelek Island there, in 2009. Kwajalein launched several flights of the Pegasus rocket by air, most recently in 2012.
TROPICS is a constellation of six 3U cube sets in three orbital planes with a slope of 30 degrees and an altitude of 600 kilometers. Each identical satellite will contain a radiometer to collect profiles of temperature and water vapor as it travels over tropical weather systems. Scientists will use TROPICS to obtain information on the structure of tropical storms, with the constellation allowing regular visits to study how the storms develop.
The TROPICS contract is the second NASA award Astra receives. In December, the company was one of three small launcher vehicle developers to win Venture Class Launch Services contracts for the launch of cubesats. The Astra grant, valued at $ 3.9 million, is for the dedicated launch of 30 kilograms of cububat on a 500-kilometer track in the middle of the slopes, no later than June 2022.
General Atomics announced on February 24 that they had selected Rocket Lab to launch an Orbital Test Bed satellite he developed with the Argos-4 Advanced Data Collection System (A-DCS) chartered cargo. NOAA has arranged for the launch of the payload by the Hosted Payload Solutions contract vehicle operated by the Space Force’s Space and Missile Systems Center. The launch, on an Electron rocket, is scheduled for late 2021 or early 2022.
The A-DCS salary is part of the Argos data collection system which includes NOAA, the French space agency CNES, Eumetsat and the Indian space agency ISRO. The payload receives data from sensors, ranging from those mounted on ocean buoys to wildlife tracking, and sends the data to ground stations.
The contract is the second in as many weeks that General Atomics has awarded for the launch of an Orbital Test Bed satellite. The company selected Firefly Aerospace on February 18 to launch a satellite using the Multi-Angle Imager for Aerosols payload, a NASA Earth science instrument. That satellite will launch in 2022 in a polar orbit of an Alpha rocket from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.