Intuitive Machines announced on Tuesday, November 3, 2026, that it has been selected by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) to provide the spacecraft platform and system-level integration for FALCON-RADAR, a mission to study clouds and convection from space.
What the mission will observe
FALCON-RADAR is part of FALCON, short for Fleet for the Atmospheric Linking Commercial Observations with NASA. The mission will use Intuitive Machines' IM 300 bus and is targeted for launch no earlier than 2029 — a target, not a confirmed date. It will be a single satellite in a polar, sun-synchronous orbit, carrying a W-Band Cloud Profiling Doppler Radar designed to observe shallow light precipitation and small-scale cloud dynamics.
According to the company, the mission will supply two-dimensional cloud context and detect convection. Combined with water vapor and aerosol measurements from other missions, the data should help atmospheric science better understand the processes responsible for rain and snow near Earth's surface. Millimeter-wavelength radar technology may also, according to the release, support future advances for Moon and Mars applications — a possibility, not an announced plan.
Other missions in the same programme
The spacecraft is being developed in collaboration with EAGLE-VSWIR, another NASA mission recently awarded to Intuitive Machines. This is the company's third award supporting NASA's Earth science objectives in the last six months: besides FALCON-RADAR and EAGLE-VSWIR, it is supplying an IM 500 bus, integration and mission solutions for EDGE, managed by Goddard Space Flight Center and led by researcher Helen Amanda Fricker of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California San Diego.
CEO Steve Altemus said the company's modular platforms align with NASA's goal of delivering more science on faster timelines, combining manufacturing at scale with mission-systems integration.
Image credit: Intuitive Machines, via GlobeNewswire.
Fontes: Intuitive Machines, via GlobeNewswire.
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