Blue Canyon Technologies, the mission services provider and small satellite builder for RTX, has successfully established connection with both CubeSats for the NASA PREFIRE (Polar Radiant Energy in the Far InfraRed Experiment) launch. The PREFIRE mission will quantify the amount of heat that the Arctic and Antarctica release into space on Earth.
The NASA Science Mission Directorate is overseen by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at NASA, and Blue Canyon supplied two heritage 6U CubeSats for the mission. Sea ice loss, ice sheet melting, and sea level rise estimates will be improved by incorporating analysis of PREFIRE’s measurements into climate and ice models.
According to Chris Winslett, general manager of Blue Canyon Technologies, “improving climate models can provide more accurate projections on the impacts of storm severity and frequency, as well as coastal erosion and flooding.”
NASA and the University of Wisconsin-Madison collaborated to develop the PREFIRE project. The thermal infrared spectrometer payload was supplied by JPL, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison will handle the data that the instruments gather.
