PREFIRE CubeSats to operate through 2026 as mission expands worldwide

PREFIRE CubeSats to operate through 2026 as mission expands worldwide
by Clarence Oxford
Los Angeles CA (SPX) Aug 20, 2025

NASA has extended the PREFIRE mission through September 2026 and broadened its scope from the poles to the entire planet. The twin shoebox-size CubeSats measure how water vapor, clouds, and other components of Earths system trap heat, improving forecasts of storm frequency and intensity.

Launched in spring 2024, PREFIRE has been quantifying how much heat escapes to space from the Arctic and Antarctic. Earth absorbs most solar energy in the tropics, which winds, weather, and ocean currents move poleward. Polar ice, snow, and clouds then emit much of that energy as far-infrared radiation.

The imbalance between heat absorbed in the tropics and energy radiated from the poles strongly influences global temperature and drives climate and weather systems. PREFIRE targets that budget directly, providing observations needed to calibrate models that simulate polar processes and their links to worldwide conditions.

At the missions core are two advanced JPL-built spectrometers that sense far-infrared wavelengths. They are sensitive to 10 times more far-infrared wavelengths than previous instruments, enabling new insight into surface ice melt and formation, snowmelt and accumulation, and cloud-cover changes that modulate energy exchange.

"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%," said Brian Drouin, PREFIREs project scientist at JPL. "Measurements that look at the same areas but with shorter wavelengths do not show this difference."

Although PREFIRE has collected global data since launch, prime-mission analysis emphasized the poles. The extended mission will incorporate observations from lower latitudes to study how moisture circulates, where storms form, and how precipitation patterns evolve when far-infrared processes are represented more accurately.

"We have the capacity to collect data for the whole world, not just the poles. What well be able to do is look at the size of ice particles in clouds that affect energy exchange between Earth and space," said PREFIREs principal investigator, Tristan LEcuyer of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. "Well be able to incorporate the data into weather prediction models to improve forecasts and improve our understanding of how moisture circulates, which affects where storms form and how precipitation moves around the world."

The CubeSats fly in an asynchronous near-polar orbit, passing near the poles hours apart. The staggered tracks provide two snapshots of the same region, capturing short-timescale changes such as cloud-driven temperature swings at the surface that are critical to refining energy-budget estimates.