![]() Turns out we are not alone - plants show strange effects from being under the influence of artificial light, too. ![]() There is something uncannily terrible about being kept under the glare of a fluorescent tube instead of a burning ball of plasma some 94 million miles away from Earth. If you have ever worked under artificial lighting as your only source of light, then you likely know the feeling of slight malaise that comes with it. With four satellites, TROPICS will still provide improved time-resolved observations of tropical cyclones compared to traditional observing methods.” What will happen to TROPICS? NASA is committed to completing the TROPICS mission goals - just with fewer pieces of kit - according to an update posted to their site following the launch failure: “Despite a loss of the first two of six satellites, the TROPICS constellation will still meet its science objectives with the four remaining CubeSats distributed in two orbits. “With the TROPICS constellation, we’ll have much more frequent observations of tropical cyclones, and in wavelengths that can help us understand thermodynamic structure in the eye and in the storm environment,” says Bill Blackwell, principal investigator for the TROPICS mission, on a NASA blog post about the mission. TROPICS are equipped to “read” a storm and provide its operators with 3-D images of the storm’s environment, information on how it is growing, and better predictions of what it may go on to do. If that were the case, TROPICS would offer an hour-by-hour storm update - about four times faster than current NASA and National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) satellites, which give storm updates every four to six hours. The idea was that at least one satellite of the six would pass over any given spot within that area once an hour. Here’s the background - TROPICS was designed as a satellite constellation of six satellites to be positioned at three slightly different points in low-Earth orbit at a 30-degree angle above the equator - this positioning is strategized to keep the satellites’ eyes on the region of the Earth where most tropical cyclones form and build steam. More information will be provided after we complete a full data review.” We have shared our regrets with and the payload team. The upper stage shut down early and we did not deliver the payloads to orbit. After the catastrophe went down, Astra took to Twitter to release a brief statement on the issue: Following Sunday’s failure to launch, however, future launches with Astra are on pause, NASA says. Astra seems ideally suited to this task: It is a private space launch company that puts satellites and other payloads into space all under a banner mission of making Earth better - TROPICS is the company’s first explicit Earth science mission. What happened - Astra was picked by NASA to launch two of six Cubesats destined to study the formation and evolution of tropical cyclones from space, a mission known as TROPICS. A current cyclone satellite observation - TROPICS will see cyclones in far greater detail, allowing for more built-out images to help track them as they develop and grow on the ground.
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