Firefly Alpha Block 2 | INCUS
Firefly AerospaceLaunch Area 0 A — Wallops Flight Facility, Virginia, USA
Current date is a placeholder or rough estimation based on unreliable or interpreted sources.
mission
- Name
- INCUS
- Type
- Earth Science
- Target orbit
- Low Earth Orbit (LEO)
The Investigation of Convective Updrafts (INCUS) is a NASA Earth science mission led by Colorado State University that will investigate the behavior of tropical storms in order to better represent these storms in weather and climate models. It consists of 3 SmallSats flying in tight coordination to study why convective storms, heavy precipitation, and clouds occur exactly when and where they form. Each satellite will have a high frequency precipitation radar that observes rapid changes in convective cloud depth and intensities. 1 of the 3 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.
schedule
- NET (no earlier than)
- Window opens
- Window closes
- Last updated
vehicle & provider
- Rocket
- Firefly Alpha Block 2
- Family
- Firefly Alpha
- Variant
- Block 2
- Provider
- Firefly Aerospace
- Type
- Commercial
- Country
- USA
launch site
- Pad
- Launch Area 0 A
- Location
- Wallops Flight Facility, Virginia, USA
- Country
- USA
- Timezone
- America/New_York
- Coordinates
- 37.8337, -75.4881