INCUS to release on Firefly’s Alpha rocket as early as 2026 from NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility
Cedar Park, Texas, March 3, 2025 – Firefly Aerospace, the chief in end-to-end responsive area services and products, as of late introduced the corporate used to be awarded a fixed-price NASA’s Challenge-Magnificence Acquisition of Devoted and Rideshare (VADR) contract for a devoted Alpha release of the company’s Investigation of Convective Updrafts (INCUS) challenge from NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia. As a part of NASA’s Earth Gadget Science Pathfinder program, INCUS is a NASA Earth Challenge-Challenge with 3 satellites that may learn about why, when, and the place tropical storms shape to assist advance local weather trade fashions.
“Firefly provides our shoppers responsive operations and challenge flexibility with release websites at the East and West Coast of america and across the world,” mentioned Jason Kim, CEO of Firefly aerospace. “We strategically constructed our one metric ton Alpha rocket to make stronger devoted missions like INCUS. This permits our shoppers to position their satellites within the precise orbit they want and use their mission-critical sources to straight away start undertaking analysis and making developments in science.”
As soon as deployed, 3 INCUS satellites will fly in tight coordination to learn about the conduct of tropical storms and thunderstorms, together with how typhoon methods shape, evolve, and fritter away. In step with NASA, each and every satellite tv for pc could have a prime frequency precipitation radar that observes speedy adjustments in convective cloud intensity and intensities. One of the crucial 3 satellites additionally will lift a microwave radiometer to give you the spatial content material of the bigger scale climate noticed through the radars. Via flying so intently in combination, the satellites will use the slight variations in after they make observations to use a singular time-differencing way to estimate the vertical shipping of convective mass.
The INCUS challenge will release from the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport Pad 0A at NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility that helps each Alpha and Firefly’s Medium Release Automobile. INCUS might be Firefly’s 3rd Alpha release for NASA – the primary introduced effectively remaining summer time and the second one is scheduled from Vandenberg House Pressure Base for NASA QuickSounder in 2026.
Firefly’s Alpha rocket is the one commercially operational release car devoted to serving the one-metric ton satellite tv for pc marketplace. The flight-proven car supplies responsive, dependable, and cost-competitive release services and products without delay to shoppers’ most well-liked orbits.
About Firefly Aerospace
Firefly Aerospace is an end-to-end area transportation corporate with release, lunar, and on-orbit services and products. Headquartered in central Texas, Firefly is a portfolio corporate of AE Commercial Companions (“AEI”) desirous about turning in responsive, dependable, and inexpensive area get right of entry to for presidency and business shoppers. Firefly’s small- to medium-lift release automobiles, lunar landers, and orbital automobiles give you the area trade with a unmarried supply for missions from low Earth orbit to the outside of the Moon and past. For more info, talk over with www.fireflyspace.com.
Media Touch
[email protected]
