Artist’s rendition of the DAPHNE (Dynamic Atmosphere-Ionosphere Explorer) mission concept. The coloring represents auroras and atmospheric waves in Earth’s atmosphere.
Credit: Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics/Mary Tostanoski
NASA selected a mission concept to research how space weather and dynamics within Earth’s atmosphere influence the space environment and help improve prediction capabilities for impacts on crucial technology, such as GPS and low Earth orbit satellites, as well as astronauts in space.
The DAPHNE (Dynamic Atmosphere-Ionosphere Explorer) mission will enter Phase B of development, which includes planning and design for flight and mission operations. It will use identical twin satellites to study how changes in Earth’s lower atmosphere influence our planet’s upper atmosphere, where space weather is manifested.
“NASA is advancing the United States’ leadership as a space weather-ready nation, and by providing new insights into Earth’s atmosphere we can better predict and prepare for impacts in our daily lives on Earth and in space,” said Nicky Fox, associate administrator, Science Mission Directorate, NASA Headquarters in Washington. “As NASA sends astronauts beyond Earth’s magnetic protection to the Moon, Mars, and beyond, DAPHNE will join the NASA science fleet strategically located across the solar system to provide data that will help mission planners predict and mitigate the effects of space weather for the benefit of all.”
The DAPHNE mission’s low-risk high-return concept will provide coordinated, multi-point measurements of neutral winds, temperature, and composition in the thermosphere. The ionosphere and thermosphere regions are where Earth’s neutral atmosphere transitions into the ionized plasma of space. In this thin shell that surrounds the planet, the atmosphere is in constant motion, shaped by the influence of solar activity and changes in the lower atmosphere and in near-Earth space.
Fundamental observations and physical insights from the DAPHNE mission will incorporate lower-atmospheric energy data to advance space weather predictive capabilities. The mission is led by Aimee Merkel from the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado, Boulder.
The mission will be subject to a confirmation review in 2027, which will assess the progress of the mission and the availability of funds. If confirmed, the total estimated cost of the mission, excluding launch, will not exceed $250 million in fiscal year 2023 dollars, with a mission launch date of no earlier than 2029.
The DAPHNE mission was proposed as a concept study in response to the DYNAMIC (Dynamical Neutral Atmosphere-Ionosphere Coupling) mission announcement of opportunity. Funding and management oversight for this mission is provided by the Solar Terrestrial Probes program at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.
For more information on NASA’s heliophysics missions, visit:
NASA has selected eight new companies and will acquire new data products from six existing Commercial Satellite Data Acquisition contract holders to expand the range of commercial satellite data available to researchers, civil agencies, and decision-makers. Such measurements supplement NASA’s Earth satellites by contributing high-resolution and frequent observations to enhance the agency’s set of data.
Leveraging commercial data demonstrates NASA’s commitment to strong public-private partnerships, allowing the agency to expand scientific insight while reducing costs and accelerating the delivery of data to researchers and decision-makers.
Collectively, NASA and commercial Earth observations provide insight into our home planet – benefitting Americans, providing environmental intelligence, strengthening disaster response, and improving public safety.
The Commercial Satellite Data Acquisition Program On-Ramp 2 Multiple Award contract is a firm-fixed-price, indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity multiple-award contract. The original maximum contract value was $476 million, with a performance period that began in 2023 and continues through Nov. 15, 2028.
Contract awardees are:
Airbus DS Geo Inc.
GHGSat Inc.
Hydrosat Inc.
ICEYE US Inc.
ImageSat International
Kuva US Inc.
Muon Space Inc.
Orbital Sidekick Inc.
OroraTech USA Inc.
Planet Labs Federal Inc.
Space Sciences and Engineering LLC, doing business as PlanetiQ
SATLANTIS US
Tomorrow Companies Inc., doing business as Tomorrow.io
Wyvern Inc.
The agency’s Commercial Satellite Data Acquisition mission works to execute a cost-effective way to augment and complement the suite of Earth observations captured by NASA and its partners by identifying, evaluating, and acquiring commercial satellite data.
For more information about NASA’s Commercial Satellite Acquisition program, visit:
NASA has selected eight new companies and will acquire new data products from six existing Commercial Satellite Data Acquisition contract holders to expand the range of commercial satellite data available to researchers, civil agencies, and decision-makers. Such measurements supplement NASA’s Earth satellites by contributing high-resolution and frequent observations to enhance the agency’s set of data.
Leveraging commercial data demonstrates NASA’s commitment to strong public-private partnerships, allowing the agency to expand scientific insight while reducing costs and accelerating the delivery of data to researchers and decision-makers.
Collectively, NASA and commercial Earth observations provide insight into our home planet – benefitting Americans, providing environmental intelligence, strengthening disaster response, and improving public safety.
The Commercial Satellite Data Acquisition Program On-Ramp 2 Multiple Award contract is a firm-fixed-price, indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity multiple-award contract. The original maximum contract value was $476 million, with a performance period that began in 2023 and continues through Nov. 15, 2028.
Contract awardees are:
Airbus DS Geo Inc.
GHGSat Inc.
Hydrosat Inc.
ICEYE US Inc.
ImageSat International
Kuva US Inc.
Muon Space Inc.
Orbital Sidekick Inc.
OroraTech USA Inc.
Planet Labs Federal Inc.
Space Sciences and Engineering LLC, doing business as PlanetiQ
SATLANTIS US
Tomorrow Companies Inc., doing business as Tomorrow.io
Wyvern Inc.
The agency’s Commercial Satellite Data Acquisition mission works to execute a cost-effective way to augment and complement the suite of Earth observations captured by NASA and its partners by identifying, evaluating, and acquiring commercial satellite data.
For more information about NASA’s Commercial Satellite Acquisition program, visit:
Even small asteroids lead complex lives. During its flyby of the asteroid Donaldjohanson last year, NASA’s Lucy spacecraft revealed the asteroid to be a wobbly, peanut-shaped body that has undergone a lot of activity in its relatively short history. Formed as fragments coalesced after a violent collision 155 million years ago, the asteroid was transformed by the small but inexorable force of the Sun’s radiation, all while retaining signs of the brief presence of liquid water in its distant past.
Zooming through the main asteroid belt toward one of the Jupiter Trojan asteroid groups, the Lucy spacecraft collected the first close-up images and other data at Donaldjohanson on April 20, 2025, as it passed 650 miles away from the asteroid. The data revealed that, instead of spinning simply around one axis like most other asteroids and planets, Donaldjohanson has a more complicated two-axis rotation. Scientists also saw Donaldjohanson’s peanut shape and the craters and ridges on its surface.
A timelapse video made from images taken by NASA’s Lucy spacecraft as it approached the asteroid Donaldjohanson on April 20, 2025. The L’LORRI (Lucy Long Range Reconnaissance Imager) instrument, the spacecraft’s high-resolution black-and-white imager, collected these images over two hours as the spacecraft rapidly closed in on the asteroid from an initial separation of more than 58,000 miles (93,000 km), until the spacecraft passed a mere 650 miles (1000 km) from the 5-mile- (8 km-) wide asteroid.
NASA/Goddard/SwRI/JHU-APL
Lucy’s encounter with the asteroid was planned as a dress rehearsal for the spacecraft and mission team before its primary asteroid encounters, which begin with Lucy’s flyby of the Trojan asteroid Eurybates on Aug. 12, 2027. The instruments performed as expected, and, as a bonus, scientists got a rare opportunity to study a previously unexplored asteroid up close and to compare it to two asteroids with similar compositions but different histories: Bennu, the target of NASA’s OSIRIS-REx sample-return mission, and Ryugu, the site of JAXA’s (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) Hayabusa2 sample-return mission.
With Earth-based telescopes, observers saw fluctuations in the light Donaldjohanson reflects, regular patterns of peaks and valleys, typical of an elongated object rotating once every 10.5 Earth days. But Lucy’s data revealed another pattern: Donaldjohanson appears to be rotating like a wobbly top. Paper authors reported that the asteroid rotates end-over-end once every 10.5 Earth days, and wobbles back and forth around its long axis once every 26.5 days.
The asteroid Donaldjohanson is shown slowly rotating in a tumbling, non-principal axis motion, with its angular momentum vector and rotation axes indicated. The surface is colored by gravity slope, which measures the angle between the local surface and the direction of gravity. Higher values (warmer colors) indicate steeper terrain relative to the local gravitational pull. Regions with limited stereo image coverage have been masked out where the shape model is less well constrained.
Kel Elkins/NASA’s Science Visualization Studio/DLR
Peanut shape
While the Earth-based observations hinted at Donaldjohanson’s elongated shape, the Lucy flyby revealed a “bilobate” structure: two lobes connected by a neck, like a peanut. These lobes are likely two fragments from an asteroid collision that gently came together afterward by their mutual gravity.
Donaldjohanson likely rotated at least 10 times faster when it formed, having slowed to its current rate in the last 20 to 60 million years, the team estimates. As it slowed, the balance between the centrifugal force pushing things apart and gravity pulling things together changed and loose rocky material slid down slopes creating the worn-down appearance of many craters, as the flyby images showed.
The paper’s authors say that the asteroid’s slowing rotation is likely caused by a subtle consequence of solar heating known as the YORP effect. Each part of the asteroid’s Sun-warmed surface radiates heat away as infrared light, and that radiation imparts a tiny recoil force to the surface. Because the asteroid’s shape isn’t symmetric, this results in a net torque, or twist, that can change the asteroid’s rotation. Thus, YORP can slow asteroid spins down or speed them up, as in the case of Bennu (once every four hours) and Ryugu (once about every seven hours), which both likely used to rotate much slower than they do today.
Fleeting water
As it passed by Donaldjohanson at 30,000 mph, Lucy recorded the signatures of iron-rich clay minerals on the surface. These clays must have formed in the distant past with the help of liquid water. However, the exposure must have been brief, Lucy scientists concluded, because iron in clays tends to be replaced with other elements, such as magnesium, as water lingers.
Indeed, scientists saw magnesium-rich clays at Bennu and Ryugu, which suggested prolonged water exposure, perhaps lasting millions of years, when they were still part of larger asteroids.
This difference in water exposure history, and other characteristics, may mean that the parent bodies of these asteroids formed at different times or in different regions of the solar system before relocating to the main belt.
Compare, contrast
Donaldjohanson is thought to be made from rocky remnants of a larger, carbon- and water-rich asteroid that collided with another object in the main asteroid belt. Bennu and Ryugu are thought to have formed in the same way and in the same region.
But Donaldjohanson is different. At 155 million years old, it is much younger than Bennu and Ryugu, which formed 1 to 2 billion years ago. Donaldjohanson also has remained in the asteroid belt since birth, while its wandering cousins migrated into orbits around the Sun that bring them close to Earth’s orbit about once a year (which made them perfect close targets for sample return missions).
During its April 20, 2025, encounter with the main-belt asteroid Donaldjohanson, NASA’s Lucy spacecraft discovered evidence for iron-rich clays on the surface using its infrared spectrometer. These clays, which are similar to those found in carbon-rich meteorites such as QUE 97990, indicate that water was briefly present in the asteroid during the distant past.
NASA/Goddard/SwRI/Dan Gallagher
“It’s helpful for scientists to compare Donaldjohanson with asteroids like Bennu and Ryugu, which are seemingly similar asteroids, because every subtle difference is another clue to our origin story,” said Simone Marchi, Lucy deputy principal investigator and lead author of the study at the Boulder, Colorado, office of the Southwest Research Institute.
“Once we start learning more about the Trojans, a completely different population of space rocks with very different histories, our understanding of solar system formation is destined to be challenged,” said Marchi.
Named after a fossilized skeleton of a human ancestor discovered in Ethiopia in 1974, NASA’s Lucy will be the first mission to explore Jupiter’s Trojan asteroids, a population of well-preserved space rocks that formed early in our solar system’s history and could help scientists understand how the planets formed and moved around before settling in their current configuration.
Lucy’s principal investigator is based out of the Boulder, Colorado, branch of Southwest Research Institute, headquartered in San Antonio. NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, provides overall mission management, systems engineering, and safety and mission assurance. Lockheed Martin Space in Littleton, Colorado, built the spacecraft. Lucy is the 13th mission in NASA’s Discovery Program. NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, manages the Discovery Program for the agency’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington.
For more information on NASA’s Lucy mission, visit:
Zooming through the main asteroid belt toward one of the Jupiter Trojan asteroid groups, the Lucy spacecraft collected the first close-up images and other data at Donaldjohanson on April 20, 2025, as it passed 650 miles away from the asteroid. The data revealed that, instead of spinning simply around one axis like most other asteroids and planets, Donaldjohanson has a more complicated two-axis rotation. Scientists also saw Donaldjohanson’s peanut shape and the craters and ridges on its surface.
Even small asteroids lead complex lives. During its flyby of the asteroid Donaldjohanson last year, NASA’s Lucy spacecraft revealed the asteroid to be a wobbly, peanut-shaped body that has undergone a lot of activity in its relatively short history. Formed as fragments coalesced after a violent collision 155 million years ago, the asteroid was transformed by the small but inexorable force of the Sun’s radiation, all while retaining signs of the brief presence of liquid water in its distant past.
Zooming through the main asteroid belt toward one of the Jupiter Trojan asteroid groups, the Lucy spacecraft collected the first close-up images and other data at Donaldjohanson on April 20, 2025, as it passed 650 miles away from the asteroid. The data revealed that, instead of spinning simply around one axis like most other asteroids and planets, Donaldjohanson has a more complicated two-axis rotation. Scientists also saw Donaldjohanson’s peanut shape and the craters and ridges on its surface.
A timelapse video made from images taken by NASA’s Lucy spacecraft as it approached the asteroid Donaldjohanson on April 20, 2025. The L’LORRI (Lucy Long Range Reconnaissance Imager) instrument, the spacecraft’s high-resolution black-and-white imager, collected these images over two hours as the spacecraft rapidly closed in on the asteroid from an initial separation of more than 58,000 miles (93,000 km), until the spacecraft passed a mere 650 miles (1000 km) from the 5-mile- (8 km-) wide asteroid.
NASA/Goddard/SwRI/JHU-APL
Lucy’s encounter with the asteroid was planned as a dress rehearsal for the spacecraft and mission team before its primary asteroid encounters, which begin with Lucy’s flyby of the Trojan asteroid Eurybates on Aug. 12, 2027. The instruments performed as expected, and, as a bonus, scientists got a rare opportunity to study a previously unexplored asteroid up close and to compare it to two asteroids with similar compositions but different histories: Bennu, the target of NASA’s OSIRIS-REx sample-return mission, and Ryugu, the site of JAXA’s (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) Hayabusa2 sample-return mission.
With Earth-based telescopes, observers saw fluctuations in the light Donaldjohanson reflects, regular patterns of peaks and valleys, typical of an elongated object rotating once every 10.5 Earth days. But Lucy’s data revealed another pattern: Donaldjohanson appears to be rotating like a wobbly top. Paper authors reported that the asteroid rotates end-over-end once every 10.5 Earth days, and wobbles back and forth around its long axis once every 26.5 days.
The asteroid Donaldjohanson is shown slowly rotating in a tumbling, non-principal axis motion, with its angular momentum vector and rotation axes indicated. The surface is colored by gravity slope, which measures the angle between the local surface and the direction of gravity. Higher values (warmer colors) indicate steeper terrain relative to the local gravitational pull. Regions with limited stereo image coverage have been masked out where the shape model is less well constrained.
Kel Elkins/NASA’s Science Visualization Studio/DLR
Peanut shape
While the Earth-based observations hinted at Donaldjohanson’s elongated shape, the Lucy flyby revealed a “bilobate” structure: two lobes connected by a neck, like a peanut. These lobes are likely two fragments from an asteroid collision that gently came together afterward by their mutual gravity.
Donaldjohanson likely rotated at least 10 times faster when it formed, having slowed to its current rate in the last 20 to 60 million years, the team estimates. As it slowed, the balance between the centrifugal force pushing things apart and gravity pulling things together changed and loose rocky material slid down slopes creating the worn-down appearance of many craters, as the flyby images showed.
The paper’s authors say that the asteroid’s slowing rotation is likely caused by a subtle consequence of solar heating known as the YORP effect. Each part of the asteroid’s Sun-warmed surface radiates heat away as infrared light, and that radiation imparts a tiny recoil force to the surface. Because the asteroid’s shape isn’t symmetric, this results in a net torque, or twist, that can change the asteroid’s rotation. Thus, YORP can slow asteroid spins down or speed them up, as in the case of Bennu (once every four hours) and Ryugu (once about every seven hours), which both likely used to rotate much slower than they do today.
Fleeting water
As it passed by Donaldjohanson at 30,000 mph, Lucy recorded the signatures of iron-rich clay minerals on the surface. These clays must have formed in the distant past with the help of liquid water. However, the exposure must have been brief, Lucy scientists concluded, because iron in clays tends to be replaced with other elements, such as magnesium, as water lingers.
Indeed, scientists saw magnesium-rich clays at Bennu and Ryugu, which suggested prolonged water exposure, perhaps lasting millions of years, when they were still part of larger asteroids.
This difference in water exposure history, and other characteristics, may mean that the parent bodies of these asteroids formed at different times or in different regions of the solar system before relocating to the main belt.
Compare, contrast
Donaldjohanson is thought to be made from rocky remnants of a larger, carbon- and water-rich asteroid that collided with another object in the main asteroid belt. Bennu and Ryugu are thought to have formed in the same way and in the same region.
But Donaldjohanson is different. At 155 million years old, it is much younger than Bennu and Ryugu, which formed 1 to 2 billion years ago. Donaldjohanson also has remained in the asteroid belt since birth, while its wandering cousins migrated into orbits around the Sun that bring them close to Earth’s orbit about once a year (which made them perfect close targets for sample return missions).
During its April 20, 2025, encounter with the main-belt asteroid Donaldjohanson, NASA’s Lucy spacecraft discovered evidence for iron-rich clays on the surface using its infrared spectrometer. These clays, which are similar to those found in carbon-rich meteorites such as QUE 97990, indicate that water was briefly present in the asteroid during the distant past.
NASA/Goddard/SwRI/Dan Gallagher
“It’s helpful for scientists to compare Donaldjohanson with asteroids like Bennu and Ryugu, which are seemingly similar asteroids, because every subtle difference is another clue to our origin story,” said Simone Marchi, Lucy deputy principal investigator and lead author of the study at the Boulder, Colorado, office of the Southwest Research Institute.
“Once we start learning more about the Trojans, a completely different population of space rocks with very different histories, our understanding of solar system formation is destined to be challenged,” said Marchi.
Named after a fossilized skeleton of a human ancestor discovered in Ethiopia in 1974, NASA’s Lucy will be the first mission to explore Jupiter’s Trojan asteroids, a population of well-preserved space rocks that formed early in our solar system’s history and could help scientists understand how the planets formed and moved around before settling in their current configuration.
Lucy’s principal investigator is based out of the Boulder, Colorado, branch of Southwest Research Institute, headquartered in San Antonio. NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, provides overall mission management, systems engineering, and safety and mission assurance. Lockheed Martin Space in Littleton, Colorado, built the spacecraft. Lucy is the 13th mission in NASA’s Discovery Program. NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, manages the Discovery Program for the agency’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington.
For more information on NASA’s Lucy mission, visit:
Zooming through the main asteroid belt toward one of the Jupiter Trojan asteroid groups, the Lucy spacecraft collected the first close-up images and other data at Donaldjohanson on April 20, 2025, as it passed 650 miles away from the asteroid. The data revealed that, instead of spinning simply around one axis like most other asteroids and planets, Donaldjohanson has a more complicated two-axis rotation. Scientists also saw Donaldjohanson’s peanut shape and the craters and ridges on its surface.
NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman announces a public-private partnership to advance Mars science during an event at Relativity Space on June 17, 2026.
Credit: Relativity Space
NASA Wednesday announced a new public‑private partnership to advance Mars science by combining the agency’s scientific leadership with commercial innovation. Under this model, NASA will provide the Aeolus atmospheric‑science instrument payload suite, while Relativity Space supplies the spacecraft, rocket, and cruise operations necessary to deliver the instruments to Mars.
This partnership reflects NASA’s growing commitment to approaches that accelerate discovery, expand mission cadence, and strengthen the foundation for future human exploration. By leveraging commercial investment and development capacity, NASA can focus resources on high‑value science while enabling more frequent opportunities to gather critical data about Mars, data essential to safely navigating the Martian atmosphere and ultimately landing humans on the surface.
“Public-private partnerships like this are a force multiplier for science,” said NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman. “By pairing NASA’s world‑class instruments with commercial innovation and investment, we can deliver more science, more often, and reduce the time it takes to get essential data into the hands of researchers preparing for future human missions to Mars.”
Aeolus, scheduled to launch in 2028, is a NASA‑developed suite of four complementary instruments designed to provide the first integrated, daily, global view of Martian winds, temperatures, dust, and clouds. By improving models for dust, winds, temperature, and seasonal atmospheric behavior, Aeolus will generate the detailed environmental knowledge required to reduce risk for future crewed and uncrewed landings. These measurements will directly inform entry, descent, and landing systems and support safer, more predictable mission planning for astronauts.
Aeolus builds on more than two decades of NASA missions that have studied the Martian atmosphere, including orbiters such as MAVEN (Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution), the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, and Mars Odyssey, while taking the foundation laid by earlier missions even further, continuing NASA’s tradition of expanding the frontiers of Mars science. Researchers at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley will design, build, and integrate the payload, while Relativity Space will manage spacecraft development and mission operations.
“As NASA’s Innovation Center of Excellence, Ames is committed to delivering the technologies, capabilities, and creative partnerships that enable the agency’s boldest missions,” said Dr. Eugene Tu, center director, NASA Ames. “Aeolus reflects how innovative collaboration accelerates science and strengthens the foundation needed for one day landing humans on Mars.”
The Aeolus payload suite includes four NASA‑built instruments:
Doppler Wind and Temperature Sounder (DWTS‑Ozone): Measures wind and temperature profiles from the surface up to approximately 37 miles (60 km). A collaboration with GATS.
Thermal Limb Sounder (TLS): Provides vertical temperature profiles and observations of dust and water‑ice clouds. A collaboration with Xiomas Technologies.
Surface Radiometric Sensor Package (SuRSeP): Measures surface energy balance, dust, and cloud properties.
Wide‑Field Context Camera (WFCC): Captures daily global images of atmospheric activity.
NASA will support operations of science instruments for at least one Martian year, while Relativity Space maintains the spacecraft. As part of the agreement, NASA will develop the data‑processing pipeline needed to transform raw measurements into high‑quality, ready‑to‑use data products for broad scientific use.
This effort is supported under NASA’s first six‑year reimbursable Space Act Agreement, providing a stable framework for sustained collaboration, predictable development, and mission continuity.
NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman announces a public-private partnership to advance Mars science during an event at Relativity Space on June 17, 2026.
Credit: Relativity Space
NASA Wednesday announced a new public‑private partnership to advance Mars science by combining the agency’s scientific leadership with commercial innovation. Under this model, NASA will provide the Aeolus atmospheric‑science instrument payload suite, while Relativity Space supplies the spacecraft, rocket, and cruise operations necessary to deliver the instruments to Mars.
This partnership reflects NASA’s growing commitment to approaches that accelerate discovery, expand mission cadence, and strengthen the foundation for future human exploration. By leveraging commercial investment and development capacity, NASA can focus resources on high‑value science while enabling more frequent opportunities to gather critical data about Mars, data essential to safely navigating the Martian atmosphere and ultimately landing humans on the surface.
“Public-private partnerships like this are a force multiplier for science,” said NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman. “By pairing NASA’s world‑class instruments with commercial innovation and investment, we can deliver more science, more often, and reduce the time it takes to get essential data into the hands of researchers preparing for future human missions to Mars.”
Aeolus, scheduled to launch in 2028, is a NASA‑developed suite of four complementary instruments designed to provide the first integrated, daily, global view of Martian winds, temperatures, dust, and clouds. By improving models for dust, winds, temperature, and seasonal atmospheric behavior, Aeolus will generate the detailed environmental knowledge required to reduce risk for future crewed and uncrewed landings. These measurements will directly inform entry, descent, and landing systems and support safer, more predictable mission planning for astronauts.
Aeolus builds on more than two decades of NASA missions that have studied the Martian atmosphere, including orbiters such as MAVEN (Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution), the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, and Mars Odyssey, while taking the foundation laid by earlier missions even further, continuing NASA’s tradition of expanding the frontiers of Mars science. Researchers at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley will design, build, and integrate the payload, while Relativity Space will manage spacecraft development and mission operations.
“As NASA’s Innovation Center of Excellence, Ames is committed to delivering the technologies, capabilities, and creative partnerships that enable the agency’s boldest missions,” said Dr. Eugene Tu, center director, NASA Ames. “Aeolus reflects how innovative collaboration accelerates science and strengthens the foundation needed for one day landing humans on Mars.”
The Aeolus payload suite includes four NASA‑built instruments:
Doppler Wind and Temperature Sounder (DWTS‑Ozone): Measures wind and temperature profiles from the surface up to approximately 37 miles (60 km). A collaboration with GATS.
Thermal Limb Sounder (TLS): Provides vertical temperature profiles and observations of dust and water‑ice clouds. A collaboration with Xiomas Technologies.
Surface Radiometric Sensor Package (SuRSeP): Measures surface energy balance, dust, and cloud properties.
Wide‑Field Context Camera (WFCC): Captures daily global images of atmospheric activity.
NASA will support operations of science instruments for at least one Martian year, while Relativity Space maintains the spacecraft. As part of the agreement, NASA will develop the data‑processing pipeline needed to transform raw measurements into high‑quality, ready‑to‑use data products for broad scientific use.
This effort is supported under NASA’s first six‑year reimbursable Space Act Agreement, providing a stable framework for sustained collaboration, predictable development, and mission continuity.
Login
