The First TROPICS Launch Failed

I have been quietly excited about today. The TROPICS-1 Cubesat mission was set to launch this weekend. This is a mission that was leveraging the cost and flexibility of small cubesats to provide nearly-hourly observations of precipitation, humidity, and temperature within hurricanes and other tropical cyclones. The first of three launches, at Cape Canaveral Space Force, was Sunday from Astra’s Rocket 3.3. Unfortunately, NASA Launch Services Program tweeted at 2:02 pm Sunday, “After a nominal first stage flight, the upper stage of the rocket shut down early and failed to deliver the TROPICS CubeSats to orbit.” How will this affect planned hurricane and science research going forward?

What is NASA’s Time-Resolved Observations of Precipitation structure and storm Intensity with a Constellation of Smallsats (TROPICS) mission? According to NASA’s website, “TROPICS is a constellation of six CubeSats in three low-Earth orbit planes that will study tropical cyclones.” NASA research meteorologist (and former colleague) Dr. Scott Braun went on to say, “TROPICS will give us very frequent views of tropical cyclones, providing insight into their formation, intensification, and interactions with their environment and providing critical data for storm monitoring and forecasting,”

Current low -Earth orbiting weather satellites revisit storms every four to six hours with instruments that can peer “into” the systems with microwave instruments. MIT Lincoln Lab’s Bill Blackwell is principal investigator for the TROPICS mission. He noted that, “….we’re missing a lot of what’s happening in the storm,” with the infrequent satellite visits. Yes, geosynchronous satellites “see” the storms at all times, but they do not cary the cloud-storm penetrating microwave instruments found on the low-earth orbiting satellites.

NASA said in a press release, “Despite a loss of the first two of six satellites, the TROPICS constellation will still meet its science objectives with the four remaining CubeSats distributed in two orbits.” I believe this is true, but the mission is likely to be compromised. At full capacity, six TROPICS cubesats (in slightly different orbits) would have provided maximum revisits over the hurricane (or tropical cyclone in general) breeding grounds (~38 N to 38 S latitude). With all six satellites, NASA said that, “one of the TROPICS satellites will pass over any given area within that band about once an hour.” It is doubtful that this statement holds with two satellites out of the picture for now. However, in a “lemon to lemonades moment,” four TROPICS cubesats and a predecessor pathfinder mission launched in 2021 will still give us improved science data. If we can get them up there.

Not only was the revisit time important, TROPICS will be operating in a portion of the microwave spectrum (90 to 205 gigahertz) that provide valuable information on ice and cloud properties, according to NASA. As a former Deputy Project Scientist for NASA’s Global Precipitation Measurement Mission, I know that our community has been excited about these new emerging capabilities.

TROPICS is on of NASA’s Earth venture missions. These missions tend to be low-cost and science driven. However, they do carry some risks as any space mission does. NASA released an update saying, “As a Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) licensed mission, the FAA and Astra will lead the investigation to understand what happened during the TROPICS-1 launch. NASA will lend any expertise needed but would expect to pause the launch effort with Astra while an investigation is being conducted to ensure we move forward when ready.” Astra experience another launch problem in February.