PREFIRE CubeSats to function via 2026 as mission expands worldwide
by Clarence Oxford
Los Angeles CA (SPX) Aug 20, 2025
NASA has prolonged the PREFIRE mission via September 2026 and broadened its scope from the poles to your entire planet. The dual shoebox-size CubeSats measure how water vapor, clouds, and different parts of Earths system entice warmth, enhancing forecasts of storm frequency and depth.
Launched in spring 2024, PREFIRE has been quantifying how a lot warmth escapes to house from the Arctic and Antarctic. Earth absorbs most photo voltaic power within the tropics, which winds, climate, and ocean currents transfer poleward. Polar ice, snow, and clouds then emit a lot of that power as far-infrared radiation.
The imbalance between warmth absorbed within the tropics and power radiated from the poles strongly influences world temperature and drives local weather and climate techniques. PREFIRE targets that price range instantly, offering observations wanted to calibrate fashions that simulate polar processes and their hyperlinks to worldwide circumstances.
On the missions core are two superior JPL-built spectrometers that sense far-infrared wavelengths. They’re delicate to 10 occasions extra far-infrared wavelengths than earlier devices, enabling new perception into floor ice soften and formation, snowmelt and accumulation, and cloud-cover adjustments that modulate power change.
“The PREFIRE satellites present that at these longer wavelengths, the quantity of radiation going into house can differ from one sort of ice to a different by as a lot as 5%,” mentioned Brian Drouin, PREFIREs venture scientist at JPL. “Measurements that have a look at the identical areas however with shorter wavelengths don’t present this distinction.”
Though PREFIRE has collected world knowledge since launch, prime-mission evaluation emphasised the poles. The prolonged mission will incorporate observations from decrease latitudes to check how moisture circulates, the place storms kind, and the way precipitation patterns evolve when far-infrared processes are represented extra precisely.
“We now have the capability to gather knowledge for the entire world, not simply the poles. What properly be capable of do is have a look at the scale of ice particles in clouds that have an effect on power change between Earth and house,” mentioned PREFIREs principal investigator, Tristan LEcuyer of the College of Wisconsin-Madison. “Effectively be capable of incorporate the info into climate prediction fashions to enhance forecasts and enhance our understanding of how moisture circulates, which impacts the place storms kind and the way precipitation strikes world wide.”
The CubeSats fly in an asynchronous near-polar orbit, passing close to the poles hours aside. The staggered tracks present two snapshots of the identical area, capturing short-timescale adjustments similar to cloud-driven temperature swings on the floor which are important to refining energy-budget estimates.
Associated Hyperlinks
PREFIRE (Polar Radiant Energy in the Far-InfraRed Experiment)
Microsat News and Nanosat News at SpaceMart.com
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