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Credit: NASA NASA has selected Firefly Aerospace Inc. of Cedar Park, Texas, to provide the launch service for the agency’s Investigation of Convective Updrafts (INCUS) mission, which aims to understand why, when, and where tropical convective storms form, and why some storms produce extreme weather. The mission will launch on the company’s Alpha rocket from NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia.
The selection is part of NASA’s Venture-Class Acquisition of Dedicated and Rideshare (VADR) launch services contract. This contract allows the agency to make fixed-price indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity awards during VADR’s five-year ordering period, with a maximum total value of $300 million across all contracts.
The INCUS mission, comprised of three SmallSats flying in tight coordination, will investigate the evolution of the vertical transport of air and water by convective storms. These storms form when rapidly rising water vapor and air create towering clouds capable of producing rain, hail, and lightning. The more air and water that rise, the greater the risk of extreme weather. Convective storms are a primary source of precipitation and cause of the most severe weather on Earth.
Each satellite will have a high frequency precipitation radar that observes rapid changes in convective cloud depth and intensities. One of the three 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.
NASA selected the INCUS mission through the agency’s Earth Venture Mission-3 solicitation and Earth System Science Pathfinder program. The principal investigator for INCUS is Susan van den Heever at Colorado State University in Fort Collins. Several NASA centers support the mission, including Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. Key satellite system components will be provided by Blue Canyon Technologies and Tendeg LLC, both in Colorado. NASA’s Launch Services Program, based at the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, manages the VADR contract.
To learn more about NASA’s INCUS mission, visit:
https://science.nasa.gov/mission/incus
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Tiernan Doyle
Headquarters, Washington
202-358-1600
tiernan.doyle@nasa.gov
Patti Bielling
Kennedy Space Center, Florida
321-501-7575
patricia.a.bielling@nasa.gov
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Last Updated Mar 04, 2025 LocationNASA Headquarters Related Terms
Investigation of Convective Updrafts (INCUS) Earth Science Planetary Science Division Science & Research Science Mission Directorate SmallSats Program Wallops Flight Facility View the full article
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By NASA
5 min read
NASA CubeSat Finds New Radiation Belts After May 2024 Solar Storm
Key Points
The May 2024 solar storm created two new temporary belts of high-energy particles surrounding Earth. Such belts have been seen before, but the new ones were particularly long lasting, especially the new proton belt. The findings are particularly important for spacecraft launching into geostationary orbits, which can be damaged as they traverse the dangerous belts. The largest solar storm in two decades hit Earth in May 2024. For several days, wave after wave of high-energy charged particles from the Sun rocked the planet. Brilliant auroras engulfed the skies, and some GPS communications were temporarily disrupted.
With the help of a serendipitously resurrected small NASA satellite, scientists have discovered that this storm also created two new temporary belts of energetic particles encircling Earth. The findings are important to understanding how future solar storms could impact our technology.
The new belts formed between two others that permanently surround Earth called the Van Allen Belts. Shaped like concentric rings high above Earth’s equator, these permanent belts are composed of a mix of high-energy electrons and protons that are trapped in place by Earth’s magnetic field. The energetic particles in these belts can damage spacecraft and imperil astronauts who pass through them, so understanding their dynamics is key to safe spaceflight.
The May 2024 solar storm created two extra radiation belts, sandwiched between the two permanent Van Allen Belts. One of the new belts, shown in purple, included a population of protons, giving it a unique composition that hadn’t been seen before. NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center/Kristen Perrin The discovery of the new belts, made possible by NASA’s Colorado Inner Radiation Belt Experiment (CIRBE) satellite and published Feb. 6, 2025, in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Space Physics, is particularly important for protecting spacecraft launching into geostationary orbits, since they travel through the Van Allen Belts several times before reaching their final orbit.
New Belts Amaze Scientists
Temporary belts have been detected in the aftermath of large solar storms before. But while previous belts have been composed mostly of electrons, the innermost of the two new belts also included energetic protons. This unique composition is likely due to the strength and composition of the solar storm.
“When we compared the data from before and after the storm, I said, ‘Wow, this is something really new,’” said the paper’s lead author Xinlin Li, a professor at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP) and Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences at the University of Colorado Boulder. “This is really stunning.”
The new belts also seem to have lasted much longer than previous belts. Whereas previous temporary belts lasted around four weeks, the new belt composed primary of electrons lasted more than three months. The other belt, that also includes protons, has lasted much longer than the electron belt because it is in a more stable region and is less prone to the physical processes that can knock the particles out of orbit. It is likely still there today.
“These are really high-energy electrons and protons that have found their way into Earth’s inner magnetic environment,” said David Sibeck, former mission scientist for NASA’s Van Allen Probes and research scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, who was not involved with the new study. “Some might stay in this place for a very long time.”
How long such belts stick around depends on passing solar storms. Large storms can provide the energy to knock particles in these belts out of their orbits and send them spiraling off into space or down to Earth. One such storm at the end of June significantly decreased the size of the new electron belt and another in August nearly erased the remainder of that electron belt, though a small population of high-energy electrons endured.
CubeSat Fortuitously Comes Back to Life to Make the Discovery
The new discovery was made by NASA’s CIRBE satellite, a CubeSat about the size of a shoebox that circled the planet’s magnetic poles in a low Earth orbit from April 2023 to October 2024. CIRBE housed an instrument called the Relativistic Electron Proton Telescope integrated little experiment-2 (REPTile-2) — a miniaturized and upgraded version of an instrument that flew aboard NASA’s Van Allen Probes, which made the first discovery of a temporary electron belt in 2013.
The CIRBE CubeSat in the laboratory before launch. CIRBE was designed and built by LASP at the University of Colorado Boulder. Xinlin Li/LASP/CU Boulder After a year in space, the CubeSat experienced an anomaly and unexpectedly went quiet on April 15, 2024. The scientists were disappointed to miss the solar storm in May but were able to rely on other spacecraft to provide some preliminary data on the electron belt. Luckily, on June 15, the spacecraft sprang back to life and resumed taking measurements. The data provided high-resolution information that couldn’t be gleaned by any other instrument and allowed the scientists to understand the magnitude of the new belts.
“Once we resumed measurements, we were able to see the new electron belt, which wasn’t visible in the data from other spacecraft,” Li said.
Having the CubeSat in orbit to measure the effect of the solar storm has been bittersweet, Li said. While it provided the opportunity to measure the effects of such a large event, the storm also increased atmospheric drag on the CubeSat, which caused its orbit to decrease prematurely. As a result, the CubeSat deorbited in October 2024. However, the spacecraft’s data makes it all worth it.
“We are very proud that our very small CubeSat made such a discovery,” Li said.
CIRBE was designed and built by LASP at the University of Colorado Boulder and was launched through NASA’s CubeSat Launch Initiative (CSLI). The mission is sponsored by NASA’s Heliophysics Flight Opportunities for Research & Technology (H-FORT) program.
By Mara Johnson-Groh
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
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Last Updated Feb 06, 2025 Related Terms
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NASA Flights Map Critical Minerals from Skies Above Western US
Various minerals are revealed in vibrant detail in this sample mineral map of Cuprite, Nevada, following processing of imaging spectrometer data. USGS On a crystal-clear afternoon above a desert ghost town, a NASA aircraft scoured the ground for minerals.
The plane, a high-altitude ER-2 research aircraft, had taken off early that morning from NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center in Edwards, California. Below pilot Dean Neeley, the landscape looked barren and brown. But to the optical sensors installed on the plane’s belly and wing, it gleamed in hundreds of colors.
Neeley’s flight that day was part of GEMx, the Geological Earth Mapping Experiment led by NASA and the U.S. Geological Survey to map critical minerals across more than 190,000 square miles (500,000 square kilometers) of North American soil. Using airborne instruments, scientists are collecting these measurements over parts of California, Nevada, Arizona, and Oregon. That’s an area about the size of Spain.
An ER-2 science aircraft banks away during a flight over the southern Sierra Nevada. The high-altitude plane supports a wide variety of research missions, including the GEMx campaign, which is mapping critical minerals in the Western U.S. using advanced airborne imaging developed by NASA. Credit: NASA/Carla Thomas Lithium, aluminum, rare earth elements such as neodymium and cerium — these are a few of the 50 mineral commodities deemed essential to U.S. national security, to the tech industry, and to clean energy. They support a wide range of technologies from smartphones to steelmaking, from wind turbines to electric vehicle batteries. In 2023, the U.S. imported its entire supply of 12 of these minerals and imported at least 50% of its supply of another 29.
The GEMx team believes that undiscovered deposits of at least some of these minerals exist domestically, and modern mineral maps will support exploration by the private sector.
“We’ve been exploring the earth beneath our feet for hundreds of years, and we’re discovering that we’ve only just begun,” said Kevin Reath, NASA’s associate project manager for GEMx.
The View From 65,000 Feet
To jumpstart mineral exploration, USGS is leading a nationwide survey from the inside out, using tools like lidar and magnetic-radiometric sensors to probe ancient terrain in new detail.
The collaboration with NASA brings another tool to bear: imaging spectrometers. These advanced optical instruments need to stay cold as they fly high. From cryogenic vacuum chambers on planes or spacecraft, they detect hundreds of wavelengths of light — from the visible to shortwave infrared — reflected off planetary surfaces. The technology is now being used to help identify surface minerals across dry, treeless expanses of the Western U.S.
Every molecule reflects a unique pattern of light, like a fingerprint. Processed through a spectroscopic lens, a desert expanse can appear like an oil painting popping with different colorful minerals, including pale-green mica, blue kaolinite, and plummy gypsum.
“We’re not digging for gold. We’re revealing what’s hidden in plain sight,” said Robert Green, a researcher at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, who helped pioneer spectroscopic imaging at NASA JPL in the late 1970s. Like many of the scientists involved with GEMx, he has spent years surveying other worlds, including the Moon and Mars.
A handful of such instruments exist on Earth, and Green is in charge of two of them. One, called EMIT (Earth Surface Mineral Dust Source Investigation) flies aboard the International Space Station. Surveying Earth’s surface from about 250 miles (410 kilometers) above, EMIT has captured thousands of images at a resolution of 50 by 50 miles (80 by 80 kilometers) in a wide belt around Earth’s mid-section.
The other instrument rides beneath the fuselage of the ER-2 aircraft. Called AVIRIS (Airborne Visible/Infrared Imaging Spectrometer), it’s helping guide geologists to critical minerals directly and indirectly, by spotting the types of rocks that often contain them. It’s joined by another instrument developed by NASA, the MODIS/ASTER Airborne Simulator (MASTER), which senses thermal infrared radiance. Both instruments provide finely detailed measurements of minerals that complement what EMIT sees on a broader scale.
A crew of life support staff prepare pilot Dean Neeley for an ER-2 flight. A specialized suit – similar to an astronaut’s – allows the pilot to work, breathe, and eat at altitudes almost twice as high as a cruising passenger jet. NASA/Carla Thomas Old Mines, New Finds
In and around the multimillion-year-old magmas of the Great Basin of the Western U.S., lithium takes several forms. The silvery metal is found in salty brines, in clay, and locked in more than 100 different types of crystals. It can also be detected in the tailings of abandoned prospects like Hector Mine, near Barstow, California.
Abandoned years before a magnitude 7.1 earthquake rocked the region in 1999, the mine is located on a lode of hectorite, a greasy, lithium-bearing clay. Geologists from USGS are taking a second look at legacy mines like Hector as demand for lithium rises, driven primarily by lithium-ion batteries. A typical battery pack in an electric vehicle uses about 17 pounds (eight kilograms) of the energy-dense metal.
Australia and Chile lead worldwide production of lithium, which exceeded 180,000 tons in 2023. The third largest producer is China, which also hosts about 50% of global lithium refining capacity. Total U.S. production was around 1,000 tons, sourced entirely from a deposit in northern Nevada. Known reserves in the state are estimated to contain more than a million metric tons of lithium, according to data collected by the Nevada Bureau of Mines and Geology.
Mine wastes are also potential sources of lithium, said Bernard Hubbard, a remote sensing geologist at USGS, and many other byproduct commodities that are considered critical today but were discarded by previous generations.
“There are old copper and silver mines in the West that were abandoned long before anyone knew what lithium or rare earth element deposits were,” Hubbard said. “What has been a pollution source for communities could now be a resource.”
Following a winter pause, high-altitude GEMx flights over the American West will resume in the spring of 2025, after which USGS will process the raw data and release the first mineral maps. Already, the project has collected enough data to start producing a complete hyperspectral map of California — the first of its kind.
The value of these observations extends beyond identifying minerals. Scientists expect they’ll provide new insight into invasive plant species, waste from mines that can contaminate surrounding environments, and natural hazards such as earthquakes, landslides, and wildfires.
“We are just beginning to scratch the surface in applying these measurements to help the nation’s economy, security, and health,” said Raymond Kokaly, USGS research geophysicist and lead of the GEMx survey.
More About GEMx
The GEMx research project will last four years and is funded by the USGS Earth Mapping Resources Initiative (EarthMRI), through investments from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. The initiative will capitalize on both the technology developed by NASA for spectroscopic imaging as well as the expertise in analyzing the datasets and extracting critical mineral information from them.
Data collected by GEMx is available here.
By Sally Younger
NASA’s Earth Science News Team
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Last Updated Dec 05, 2024 Contact Sally Younger Related Terms
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Via NASA Plane, Scientists Find New Gamma-ray Emission in Storm Clouds
Tropical thunderstorm with lightning, near the airport of Santa Marta, Colombia. Credit: Oscar van der Velde There’s more to thunderclouds than rain and lightning. Along with visible light emissions, thunderclouds can produce intense bursts of gamma rays, the most energetic form of light, that last for millionths of a second. The clouds can also glow steadily with gamma rays for seconds to minutes at a time.
Researchers using NASA airborne platforms have now found a new kind of gamma-ray emission that’s shorter in duration than the steady glows and longer than the microsecond bursts. They’re calling it a flickering gamma-ray flash. The discovery fills in a missing link in scientists’ understanding of thundercloud radiation and provides new insights into the mechanisms that produce lightning. The insights, in turn, could lead to more accurate lightning risk estimates for people, aircraft, and spacecraft.
Researchers from the University of Bergen in Norway led the study in collaboration with scientists from NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory, and multiple universities in the U.S., Mexico, Colombia, and Europe. The findings were described in a pair of papers in Nature, published Oct. 2.
The international research team made their discovery while flying a battery of detectors aboard a NASA ER-2 research aircraft. In July 2023, the ER-2 set out on a series of 10 flights from MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Florida. The plane flew figure-eight flight patterns a few miles above tropical thunderclouds in the Caribbean and Central America, providing unprecedented views of cloud activity.
The scientific payload was developed for the Airborne Lightning Observatory for Fly’s Eye Geostationary Lightning Mapper Simulator and Terrestrial Gamma-ray Flashes (ALOFT) campaign. Instrumentation in the payload included weather radars along with multiple sensors for measuring gamma rays, lightning flashes, and microwave emissions from clouds.
NASA’s high-flying ER-2 airplane carries instrumentation in this artist’s impression of the ALOFT mission to record gamma rays (colored purple for illustration) from thunderclouds.Credit: NASA/ALOFT team The researchers had hoped ALOFT instruments would observe fast radiation bursts known as terrestrial gamma-ray flashes (TGFs). The flashes, first discovered in 1992 by NASA’s Compton Gamma Ray Observatory spacecraft, accompany some lightning strikes and last only millionths of a second. Despite their high intensity and their association with visible lightning, few TGFs have been spotted during previous aircraft-based studies.
“I went to a meeting just before the ALOFT campaign,” said principal investigator Nikolai Østgaard, a space physicist with the University of Bergen. “And they asked me: ‘How many TGFs are you going to see?’ I said: ‘Either we’ll see zero, or we’ll see a lot.’ And then we happened to see 130.”
However, the flickering gamma-ray flashes were a complete surprise.
“They’re almost impossible to detect from space,” said co-principal investigator Martino Marisaldi, who is also a University of Bergen space physicist. “But when you are flying at 20 kilometers [12.5 miles] high, you’re so close that you will see them.” The research team found more than 25 of these new flashes, each lasting between 50 to 200 milliseconds.
The abundance of fast bursts and the discovery of intermediate-duration flashes could be among the most important thundercloud discoveries in a decade or more, said University of New Hampshire physicist Joseph Dwyer, who was not involved in the research. “They’re telling us something about how thunderstorms work, which is really important because thunderstorms produce lightning that hurts and kills a lot of people.”
More broadly, Dwyer said he is excited about the prospects of advancing the field of meteorology. “I think everyone assumes that we figured out lightning a long time ago, but it’s an overlooked area … we don’t understand what’s going on inside those clouds right over our heads.” The discovery of flickering gamma-ray flashes may provide crucial clues scientists need to understand thundercloud dynamics, he said.
Turning to aircraft-based instrumentation rather than satellites ensured a lot of bang for research bucks, said the study’s project scientist, Timothy Lang of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.
“If we had gotten one flash, we would have been ecstatic — and we got well over 100,” he said. This research could lead to a significant advance in our understanding of thunderstorms and radiation from thunderstorms. “It shows that if you have the right problem and you’re willing to take a little bit of risk, you can have a huge payoff.”
By James Riordon
NASA’s Earth Science News Team
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Last Updated Oct 02, 2024 EditorJenny MarderContactJames RiordonLocationMarshall Space Flight Center Related Terms
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