A Colorado State University-led effort to study storms and extreme weather from space using small satellites passed a key review by NASA in November 2023. With that approval in hand, the team will now focus on building the satellites and instruments with industry partners in Colorado, while also developing the needed research techniques and software to accomplish its mission.
The development marks an important milestone for the $177 million at selection Investigation of Convective Updrafts mission known as INCUS. The project aims to understand when, where and why tropical convective storms form and why only some of them produce extreme weather like heavy rain and strong wind. Key to those questions is the role of the vertical transportation of air and water in those types of storms – an aspect that is currently not well understood or easy to represent in forecasts and modeling. The INCUS mission addresses that need directly by using multiple satellites orbiting the planet to provide a sequential, top-down view of the dynamics within storms and how they change.
The move from the design stage to the construction stage of the instruments, spacecraft and mission systems sets up a launch that will occur no later than 2027, said Principal Investigator Sue van den Heever, a University Distinguished Professor in the Department of Atmospheric Science.
“I can confidently state that those attending the approval meetings were impressed with the game-changing observations that INCUS will make, the unique approaches being used to obtain these observations, and the innovative ways in which all of our technological needs and challenges are being successfully addressed,” she said. “I am remarkably proud of our INCUS team and know that with such a talented group of scientists and engineers, the odds of implementing and conducting a successful mission are extremely high.”
The mission is supported by several NASA centers, including the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Goddard Space Flight Center and Marshall Space Flight Center. In Colorado, satellite system components will be made by independent companies Blue Canyon Technologies and Tendeg LLC. The research team for the mission also includes several university partners at City College of New York, Stony Brook University, Texas A&M University, the University of Alabama in Huntsville, UCLA and the University of Utah.
The observations will be housed and disseminated to the NASA data archiving centers by the Cooperative Institute for Research in the Atmosphere – a multidisciplinary cooperation between the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and CSU.
The INCUS mission builds on extensive expertise in remote sensing, satellite development, weather and climate science in the Department of Atmospheric Science in the Walter Scott, Jr. College of Engineering. That includes past partnerships with NASA around the CloudSat and TEMPEST-D weather research projects, which had related goals and were highly successful.
Researchers at CSU and the INCUS science team are now working on coding the software and firmware needed for the mission, said Associate Professor Kristen Rasmussen, who is a co-investigator. They are also setting up the data and algorithmic infrastructure needed to collect and then understand and share results. She said the mission will eventually provide a tremendous amount of data that needs to be processed before providing science products to the community.
