Iowa's News Now--In just over five months, the University of Iowa will be launching its TRACERS mission which currently stands as the largest grant ever awarded to the university.

In 2019, Dr. Kletzing with University of Iowa's Physics and Astronomy Department pitched the research study to NASA to examine the near-Earth interaction between our magnetosphere and the sun's solar winds.

This new mission is sort of a follow-up on the university's earlier TRICE missions in late 2008 and the TRICE-2 missions in late 2018.

Those missions were focused on the near-earth interaction between our magnetosphere, too, but were flown onboard a sounding rocket. These are smaller rockets that can carry small payloads to 30 to 60 miles above the Earth's surface before falling back down -- giving the TRICE and TRICE-2 missions just a short sample set of data.

This time around, NASA awarded the University of Iowa $115 million for the project, aiming to continue that research by keeping a close eye on the same part of space they were looking at nearly 20 years ago.

The project name, TRACERS, stands for Tandem Reconnection and Cusp Electrodynamics Reconnaissance Satellites. These will be a pair of nearly identical satellites that will go into a polar orbit around Earth, which is an orbit that goes from north to south, rather than following the equator.

[The goal is] basically to study how the output of the sun connects to near-Earth space. That's the same process that drives really neat things like the aurora but can also then drive things like space weather, which could be more challenging. What the sun does can be quite dynamic. What the earth does can be quite dynamic, and we want to understand how rapidly this environment can evolve because that informs our thinking of how you might forecast this," Dr. David Miles, F. Wendell Miller Associate Professor for the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Iowa and Principal Investigator for the TRACERS mission, said.

The idea is to get a better understanding of this environment to better protect satellites and GPS systems in orbit.

As of mid-November 2024, TRACERS is undergoing its final tests before they pack it up for the launch. It will be catching a ride on the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket out of Vandenberg Air Force Base in California this upcoming April.

If you'd like to learn more about the TRACERS mission, you can find additional information on the TRACERS mission page or NASA's Mission page.

The University of Iowa has had an extensive history in spaceflight from the very dawn of the space age with Dr. Van Allen and the Explorer 1 spacecraft in 1958.

by Garrett Heyd, Iowa's News Now