SpaceX deploys the Tracers mission for NASA. Screenshot via X

SpaceX launched NASA’s Tracers satellite mission on Wednesday afternoon, along with payloads for a number of rideshare customers. The Falcon 9 mission took off from Vandenberg Space Force Station in California at 11:13 a.m. PDT. 

The Tracers mission — Tandem Reconnection and Cusp Electrodynamics Reconnaissance Satellites — is made up of two satellites that will study magnetic reconnection and its effects in Earth’s atmosphere.

NASA co-funded three additional payloads on the mission: Athena EPIC, the PExT (Polylingual Experimental Terminal) technology demonstration, and the REAL (Relativistic Electron Atmospheric Loss) cubesat by Maverick Space Systems. 

York Space Systems’ Bard spacecraft is hosting the PExT technology demonstration. The terminal is designed to enable interoperability between government and commercial satellite relay networks, which would be a first of its kind.

EPIC Athena is a Department of Defense (DoD) Space Test Program mission containing a DoD experiment. SEOPS provided mission management and integration services for EPIC Athena under its Rideshare 2024-Blaze contract. The mission is a technology pathfinder of NovaWurks’ Hyper-Integrated Satlet (HISat) disaggregated satellite platform for making critical Earth science sensing measurements.

The mission also included a 12U cubesat platform developed by Tyvak International called LIDE. The satellite is set to demonstrate direct 5G broadband access from LEO to small aperture user terminals, as part of the ESA ARTES 5G program. 

It also included the Skykraft 4 satellite for Australian firm Skykraft, which is developing air traffic management (ATM) services from space.