The University of Iowa will contribute to a major new space mission designed to help NASA better understand Earth and improve capabilities to foresee environmental events and mitigate disasters.

The project, known as STRIVE — Stratosphere–Troposphere Response using Infrared Vertically-resolved light Explorer — was recently selected by NASA for continued development within the Earth System Explorers Program. The mission carries a cost cap of $355 million, excluding launch, with an anticipated launch date no earlier than 2030, according to NASA’s announcement. 

Jun Wang, University of Iowa Lichtenberger Family Chair in Chemical and Biochemical Engineering serves the STRIVE mission as deputy principal investigator, positioning Iowa as a key contributor to this effort.

“STRIVE represents the kind of collaborative, impactful research that is central to the University of Iowa’s strategic plan,” says Kevin Kregel, executive vice president and provost. “By supporting scholars like Jun Wang and investing in their success, we strengthen Iowa’s national research leadership and advance discoveries that improve lives.”

Lyatt Jaeglé, professor of atmospheric and climate sciences at the University of Washington, is the principal investigator. Scientists from the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, including Luke Oman, are also project leadership members.

Wang, also professor and departmental executive officer of chemical and biochemical engineering and associate director of Iowa Technology Institute, is an expert in atmospheric chemistry and satellite remote sensing. He has extensive experience with NASA’s Earth satellite observations. For another component, Wang will advise a group of students and scholars in Iowa to develop retrieval algorithms and data products for STRIVE.

“I am deeply grateful to NASA for its continued support of the STRIVE mission, and I am thrilled that we’re part of this national collaborative effort to develop a satellite mission to study our home planet in the 2030s,” Wang said. “I sincerely thank the P3 program and the leadership of the College of Engineering and the University of Iowa for their sustained support. This has enabled us to participate in STRIVE’s mission planning and proposal development over the past several years.”

Iowa’s involvement in STRIVE is the latest biproduct of Iowa’s P3 grant program, which invests in strategic priorities of campus. One of the program’s earliest and largest investments was $3.6 million in 2021 to expand space-based research across the university.

The STRIVE mission is expected to provide daily, near-global, high-resolution measurements of temperature, a variety of Earth’s atmospheric elements, and aerosol properties from the upper troposphere to the mesosphere – at a much higher spatial density than any previous mission. It also will measure vertical profiles of ozone and trace gasses needed to understand the recovery of the ozone layer.

The data collected from STRIVE can be expected to support longer-range weather forecasts, an important tool in protecting coastal communities where nearly half the world’s population lives. An important aim is improving the ability to track how wildfire smoke and volcanic emissions move through the atmosphere and reveal how changes at high altitudes can influence weather patterns weeks later.