The shoebox-sized satellites, launched from New Zealand in May and June 2024 on Rocket Lab rockets, are designed to measure how water vapour, clouds and other components of Earth’s climate system trap heat and prevent it from escaping into space. The data they gather will help improve climate modelling and weather forecasts, particularly the severity and frequency of storms.
Until now, the mission’s primary focus has been on the Arctic and Antarctic, where heat transported from the tropics by winds, weather and ocean currents is radiated back into space. Much of this energy escapes as far-infrared radiation, a little-studied portion of the electromagnetic spectrum that plays a key role in regulating Earth’s climate.
At the heart of PREFIRE (Polar Radiant Energy in the Far-InfraRed Experiment) are two advanced spectrometers developed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California. Unlike previous instruments, they can detect 10 times more far-infrared wavelengths, providing fresh insights into how ice, snow and clouds affect the flow of heat into space.
Early findings show that radiation at these wavelengths can vary by as much as 5 per cent depending on the type of ice – a difference not detectable at shorter wavelengths.
“The PREFIRE satellites show that at these longer wavelengths, the amount of radiation going into space can differ from one type of ice to another by as much as 5 per cent,” project scientist Brian Drouin of JPL said.
With its extended mission, PREFIRE will now broaden its scope to cover the globe, allowing researchers to feed its observations into weather prediction models. The data could improve forecasting by tracking how moisture circulates in the atmosphere, influencing storm formation and rainfall distribution.
“We have the capacity to collect data for the whole world, not just the poles,” said Tristan L’Ecuyer, the mission’s principal investigator at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. “We’ll be able to look at the size of ice particles in clouds, which affects energy exchange between Earth and space, and that will make forecasts more accurate.”
The satellites orbit the planet in asynchronous near-polar orbits, passing the same regions hours apart. This staggered timing provides two snapshots of the same location, helping scientists capture rapid changes such as shifting cloud cover and its short-term impact on local temperatures.
NASA’s JPL manages the PREFIRE mission for the agency’s Science Mission Directorate. The CubeSats were built by Blue Canyon Technologies, while the University of Wisconsin–Madison processes the data.