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NASA Earth Scientists Take Flight, Set Sail to Verify PACE Satellite Data
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By NASA
Credit: NASA NASA has selected SpaceX of Starbase, Texas, to provide launch services for the Near-Earth Object (NEO) Surveyor mission, which will detect and observe asteroids and comets that could potentially pose an impact threat to Earth.
The firm fixed price launch service task order is being awarded under the indefinite delivery/indefinite quantity NASA Launch Services II contract. The total cost to NASA for the launch service is approximately $100 million, which includes the launch service and other mission related costs. The NEO Surveyor mission is targeted to launch no earlier than September 2027 on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Florida.
The NEO Surveyor mission consists of a single scientific instrument: an almost 20-inch (50-centimeter) diameter telescope that will operate in two heat-sensing infrared wavelengths. It will be capable of detecting both bright and dark asteroids, the latter being the most difficult type to find with existing assets. The space telescope is designed to help advance NASA’s planetary defense efforts to discover and characterize most of the potentially hazardous asteroids and comets that come within 30 million miles of Earth’s orbit. These are collectively known as near-Earth objects, or NEOs.
The mission will carry out a five-year baseline survey to find at least two-thirds of the unknown NEOs larger than 140 meters (460 feet). These are the objects large enough to cause major regional damage in the event of an Earth impact. By using two heat-sensitive infrared imaging channels, the telescope can also make more accurate measurements of the sizes of NEOs and gain information about their composition, shapes, rotational states, and orbits.
The mission is tasked by NASA’s Planetary Science Division within the agency’s Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington. Program oversight is provided by NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office, which was established in 2016 to manage the agency’s ongoing efforts in planetary defense. NASA’s Planetary Missions Program Office at the agency’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, provides program management for NEO Surveyor. The project is being developed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California.
Multiple aerospace and engineering companies are contracted to build the spacecraft and its instrumentation, including BAE Systems SMS (Space & Mission Systems), Space Dynamics Laboratory, and Teledyne. The Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado, Boulder, will support operations, and the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena, California, is responsible for processing survey data and producing the mission’s data products. Caltech manages JPL for NASA. Mission team leadership includes the University of California, Los Angeles. NASA’s Launch Services Program at the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida is responsible for managing the launch service.
For more information about NEO Surveyor, visit:
https://science.nasa.gov/mission/neo-surveyor/
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Tiernan Doyle / Joshua Finch
Headquarters, Washington
202-358-1600 / 202-358-1100
tiernan.doyle@nasa.gov / joshua.a.finch@nasa.gov
Patti Bielling
Kennedy Space Center, Florida
321-501-7575
patricia.a.bielling@nasa.gov
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Last Updated Feb 21, 2025 LocationNASA Headquarters Related Terms
Kennedy Space Center Launch Services Office Launch Services Program NEO Surveyor (Near-Earth Object Surveyor Space Telescope) Planetary Defense Coordination Office Planetary Science Division Science Mission Directorate Space Operations Mission Directorate View the full article
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By NASA
Credit: NASA NASA, on behalf of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), has awarded a delivery order to BAE Systems Space & Mission Systems Inc. of Boulder, Colorado, to build spacecraft for the Lagrange 1 Series project as a part of NOAA’s Space Weather Next program.
The award made under the Rapid Spacecraft Acquisition IV contract, has a total value of approximately $230.6 million with the period of performance running from February 2025 to February 2035. The work will take place at the awardee’s facility in Boulder.
The firm-fixed-price delivery order covers all phases of the Lagrange 1 Series project operations including developing up to two spacecraft, instrument integration, satellite-level testing, training and support for the spacecraft flight operations team, and mission operations support. Rapid IV contracts serve as a fast and flexible means for the government to acquire spacecraft and related components, equipment, and services in support of NASA missions and other federal government agencies.
The Space Weather Next program will maintain and extend space weather observations from various orbitally stable points such as Lagrange 1, which is about a million miles from Earth. The first Space Weather Next Lagrange 1 Series launch, planned in 2029, will be the first observatory under the program and will provide continuity of real-time coronal imagery and upstream solar wind measurements. Space Weather Next will provide uninterrupted data continuity when NOAA’s Space Weather Follow On Lagrange 1 mission comes to its end of operations.
Observations of the Sun and the near-Earth space environment are important to protecting our technological infrastructure both on the ground and in space. The spacecraft will provide critical data to NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center which issues forecasts, warnings and alerts that help mitigate space weather impacts, including electric power outages and interruption to communications and navigation systems.
NASA and NOAA oversee the development, launch, testing, and operation of all the satellites in the Lagrange 1 Series project. NOAA is the program owner providing the requirements and funding along with managing the program, operations, data products, and dissemination to users. NASA and its commercial partners develop and build the instruments, spacecraft, and provide launch services on behalf of NOAA.
For information about NASA and agency programs, visit:
https://www.nasa.gov
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Karen Fox/Liz Vlock
Headquarters, Washington
202-358-1600
karen.c.fox@nasa.gov / elizabeth.a.vlock@nasa.gov
Jeremy Eggers
Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
757-824-2958
jeremy.l.eggers@nasa.gov
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Last Updated Feb 21, 2025 LocationNASA Headquarters Related Terms
Space Weather Heliophysics Joint Agency Satellite Division NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) Science & Research Science Mission Directorate View the full article
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By NASA
6 Min Read NASA’s PUNCH Mission to Revolutionize Our View of Solar Wind
Earth is immersed in material streaming from the Sun. This stream, called the solar wind, is washing over our planet, causing breathtaking auroras, impacting satellites and astronauts in space, and even affecting ground-based infrastructure.
NASA’s PUNCH (Polarimeter to Unify the Corona and Heliosphere) mission will be the first to image the Sun’s corona, or outer atmosphere, and solar wind together to better understand the Sun, solar wind, and Earth as a single connected system.
Launching no earlier than Feb. 28, 2025, aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California, PUNCH will provide scientists with new information about how potentially disruptive solar events form and evolve. This could lead to more accurate predictions about the arrival of space weather events at Earth and impact on humanity’s robotic explorers in space.
“What we hope PUNCH will bring to humanity is the ability to really see, for the first time, where we live inside the solar wind itself,” said Craig DeForest, principal investigator for PUNCH at Southwest Research Institute’s Solar System Science and Exploration Division in Boulder, Colorado.
This video can be freely shared and downloaded at https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/14773.
Video credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center Seeing Solar Wind in 3D
The PUNCH mission’s four suitcase-sized satellites have overlapping fields of view that combine to cover a larger swath of sky than any previous mission focused on the corona and solar wind. The satellites will spread out in low Earth orbit to construct a global view of the solar corona and its transition to the solar wind. They will also track solar storms like coronal mass ejections (CMEs). Their Sun-synchronous orbit will enable them to see the Sun 24/7, with their view only occasionally blocked by Earth.
Typical camera images are two dimensional, compressing the 3D subject into a flat plane and losing information. But PUNCH takes advantage of a property of light called polarization to reconstruct its images in 3D. As the Sun’s light bounces off material in the corona and solar wind, it becomes polarized — meaning the light waves oscillate in a particular way that can be filtered, much like how polarized sunglasses filter out glare off of water or metal. Each PUNCH spacecraft is equipped with a polarimeter that uses three distinct polarizing filters to capture information about the direction that material is moving that would be lost in typical images.
“This new perspective will allow scientists to discern the exact trajectory and speed of coronal mass ejections as they move through the inner solar system,” said DeForest. “This improves on current instruments in two ways: with three-dimensional imaging that lets us locate and track CMEs which are coming directly toward us; and with a broad field of view, which lets us track those CMEs all the way from the Sun to Earth.”
All four spacecraft are synchronized to serve as a single “virtual instrument” that spans the whole PUNCH constellation.
Crews conduct additional solar array deployment testing for NASA’s PUNCH (Polarimeter to Unify the Corona and Heliosphere) satellites at Astrotech Space Operations located on Vandenberg Space Force Base in California on Wednesday, Jan. 22, 2025. USSF 30th Space Wing/Alex Valdez The PUNCH satellites include one Narrow Field Imager and three Wide Field Imagers. The Narrow Field Imager (NFI) is a coronagraph, which blocks out the bright light from the Sun to better see details in the Sun’s corona, recreating what viewers on Earth see during a total solar eclipse when the Moon blocks the face of the Sun — a narrower view that sees the solar wind closer to the Sun. The Wide Field Imagers (WFI) are heliospheric imagers that view the very faint, outermost portion of the solar corona and the solar wind itself — giving a wide view of the solar wind as it spreads out into the solar system.
“I’m most excited to see the ‘inbetweeny’ activity in the solar wind,” said Nicholeen Viall, PUNCH mission scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “This means not just the biggest structures, like CMEs, or the smallest interactions, but all the different types of solar wind structures that fill that in between area.”
When these solar wind structures from the Sun reach Earth’s magnetic field, they can drive dynamics that affect Earth’s radiation belts. To launch spacecraft through these belts, including ones that will carry astronauts to the Moon and beyond, scientists need to understand the solar wind structure and changes in this region.
Building Off Other Missions
“The PUNCH mission is built on the shoulders of giants,” said Madhulika Guhathakurta, PUNCH program scientist at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “For decades, heliophysics missions have provided us with glimpses of the Sun’s corona and the solar wind, each offering critical yet partial views of our dynamic star’s influence on the solar system.”
When scientists combine data from PUNCH and NASA’s Parker Solar Probe, which flies through the Sun’s corona, they will see both the big picture and the up-close details. Working together, Parker Solar Probe and PUNCH span a field of view from a little more than half a mile (1 kilometer) to over 160 million miles (about 260 million kilometers).
Additionally, the PUNCH team will combine their data with diverse observations from other missions, like NASA’s CODEX (Coronal Diagnostic Experiment) technology demonstration, which views the corona even closer to the surface of the Sun from its vantage point on the International Space Station. PUNCH’s data also complements observations from NASA’s EZIE (Electrojet Zeeman Imaging Explorer) — targeted for launch in March 2025 — which investigates the magnetic field perturbations associated with Earth’s high-altitude auroras that PUNCH will also spot in its wide-field view.
A conceptual animation showing the heliosphere, the vast bubble that is generated by the Sun’s magnetic field and envelops all the planets.
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center Conceptual Image Lab As the solar wind that PUNCH will observe travels away from the Sun and Earth, it will then be studied by the IMAP (Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe) mission, which is targeting a launch in 2025.
“The PUNCH mission will bridge these perspectives, providing an unprecedented continuous view that connects the birthplace of the solar wind in the corona to its evolution across interplanetary space,” said Guhathakurta.
The PUNCH mission is scheduled to conduct science for at least two years, following a 90-day commissioning period after launch. The mission is launching as a rideshare with the agency’s next astrophysics observatory, SPHEREx (Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization and Ices Explorer).
“PUNCH is the latest heliophysics addition to the NASA fleet that delivers groundbreaking science every second of every day,” said Joe Westlake, heliophysics division director at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “Launching this mission as a rideshare bolsters its value to the nation by optimizing every pound of launch capacity to maximize the scientific return for the cost of a single launch.”
The PUNCH mission is led by Southwest Research Institute’s offices in San Antonio, Texas, and Boulder, Colorado. The mission is managed by the Explorers Program Office at NASA Goddard for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington.
By Abbey Interrante
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
Header Image:
An artist’s concept showing the four PUNCH satellites orbiting Earth.
Credits: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center Conceptual Image Lab
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Last Updated Feb 21, 2025 Related Terms
Heliophysics Coronal Mass Ejections Goddard Space Flight Center Heliophysics Division Polarimeter to Unify the Corona and Heliosphere (PUNCH) Science Mission Directorate Solar Wind Space Weather The Sun Explore More
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By NASA
2 min read
Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater)
NASA marked a key milestone Feb. 18 with installation of RS-25 engine No. E20001, the first new production engine to help power the SLS (Space Launch System) rocket on future Artemis missions to the Moon.
The engine, built by lead SLS engines contractor L3Harris (formerly Aerojet Rocketdyne), was installed on the Fred Haise Test Stand in preparation for acceptance testing next month. It represents the first of 24 new flight engines being built for missions, beginning with Artemis V.
Teams at NASA’s Stennis Space Center deliver, lift, and install the first new production RS-25 engine on the Fred Haise Test Stand on Feb. 18.NASA/Danny Nowlin Teams at NASA’s Stennis Space Center deliver, lift, and install the first new production RS-25 engine on the Fred Haise Test Stand on Feb. 18.NASA/Danny Nowlin Teams at NASA’s Stennis Space Center deliver, lift, and install the first new production RS-25 engine on the Fred Haise Test Stand on Feb. 18.NASA/Danny Nowlin Teams at NASA’s Stennis Space Center deliver, lift, and install the first new production RS-25 engine on the Fred Haise Test Stand on Feb. 18.NASA/Danny Nowlin Teams at NASA’s Stennis Space Center deliver, lift, and install the first new production RS-25 engine on the Fred Haise Test Stand on Feb. 18.NASA/Danny Nowlin Teams at NASA’s Stennis Space Center deliver, lift, and install the first new production RS-25 engine on the Fred Haise Test Stand on Feb. 18.NASA/Danny Nowlin Teams at NASA’s Stennis Space Center deliver, lift, and install the first new production RS-25 engine on the Fred Haise Test Stand on Feb. 18.NASA/Danny Nowlin Teams at NASA’s Stennis Space Center deliver, lift, and install the first new production RS-25 engine on the Fred Haise Test Stand on Feb. 18.NASA/Danny Nowlin Teams at NASA’s Stennis Space Center deliver, lift, and install the first new production RS-25 engine on the Fred Haise Test Stand on Feb. 18.NASA/Danny Nowlin Teams at NASA’s Stennis Space Center deliver, lift, and install the first new production RS-25 engine on the Fred Haise Test Stand on Feb. 18.NASA/Danny Nowlin Teams at NASA’s Stennis Space Center deliver, lift, and install the first new production RS-25 engine on the Fred Haise Test Stand on Feb. 18.NASA/Danny Nowlin Teams at NASA’s Stennis Space Center deliver, lift, and install the first new production RS-25 engine on the Fred Haise Test Stand on Feb. 18.NASA/Danny Nowlin Teams at NASA’s Stennis Space Center deliver, lift, and install the first new production RS-25 engine on the Fred Haise Test Stand on Feb. 18.NASA/Danny Nowlin The NASA Stennis test team will conduct a full-duration, 500-second hot fire, providing critical performance data to certify the engine for use on a future mission. During missions to the Moon, RS-25 engines fire for about 500 seconds and up to the 111% power level to help launch SLS, with the Orion spacecraft, into orbit.
The engine arrived at the test stand from the L3Harris Engine Assembly Facility on the engine transport trailer before being lifted onto the vertical engine installer (VEI) on the west side deck. After rolling the engine into the stand, the team used the VEI to raise and secure it in place.
The upcoming acceptance test follows two certification test series that helped verify the new engine production process and components meet all performance requirements. Four RS-25 engines help launch SLS, producing up to 2 million pounds of combined thrust.
All RS-25 engines for Artemis missions are tested and proven flightworthy at NASA Stennis prior to use. RS-25 tests are conducted by a team of operators from NASA, L3Harris, and Syncom Space Services, prime contractor for site facilities and operations.
Explore More NASA Stennis Images View the full article
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