Intuitive Machines will supply the spacecraft platform and system-level integration for NASA’s FALCON-RADAR Earth observation mission. The company announced the selection by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory on November 3, 2026.
The mission is planned as a single satellite using the company’s IM 300 spacecraft bus. Launch is targeted for no earlier than 2029 into a polar, sun-synchronous orbit. Its principal instrument is a W-band Cloud Profiling Doppler Radar designed to observe shallow, light precipitation and small-scale cloud dynamics.
A spacecraft bus provides the platform that carries a scientific instrument and supports its operation. System-level integration brings the instrument and spacecraft together as a functioning mission. In this arrangement, Intuitive Machines supplies the platform around the cloud-observing radar.
FALCON-RADAR belongs to the Fleet for the Atmospheric Linking Commercial Observations with NASA. Its observations are intended to supply cloud context and identify convection. Researchers will combine those measurements with water-vapor and aerosol observations from other missions to investigate processes producing rain and snow near Earth’s surface.
Radar measurements provide information about both cloud structure and motion. NASA’s separate, aircraft-based Cloud Radar System documents the established use of radar reflectivity and Doppler velocity measurements in cloud research. Reflectivity describes the returned radar signal; Doppler measurements use changes in that signal to measure motion along the radar’s viewing direction.
That combination connects the location of cloud material with its movement. A vertical profile describes how radar returns change with height, helping researchers examine the structure within a cloud rather than only its visible upper surface.
Intuitive Machines is developing the FALCON-RADAR spacecraft in collaboration with its work on NASA’s EAGLE-VSWIR mission, with the two missions intended to provide complementary observations.
