The US space agency NASA conducted the first of three flights from Florida this Sunday to put satellites into orbit. CubeSat Observation of the TROPICS program for monitoring tropical storms.

After some delays that crippled the initial count, an Astra rocket successfully took off from the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in central Florida at around 1:43 PM EST (1743 GMT).

NASA said in a statement that the satellite measures microwave frequencies ranging from about 90 to 205 gigahertz, which can monitor atmospheric emissions produced by water vapor, oxygen, and clouds in the atmosphere.

Every TROPICS satellite is the same: a CubeSat the size of a slice of bread and weighing about 12 pounds.

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TROPICS’ target altitude is 550 kilometers and the CubeSats pairs will have three slightly different low-Earth orbits, all at an angle of about 30 degrees above the equator.

TROPICS stands for a constellation of small satellites and tentatively resolved observations of precipitation pattern and storm intensity.

The program consists of a total of six satellites launched by three Astra flights. The seventh satellite to serve as the rover was launched in 2021.

That satellite Pathfinder was a CubeSat test that captured images of several tropical cyclones, including Hurricane Ida over the United States, Cyclone Batsirai over Madagascar, and Super Typhoon Mindulle over eastern Japan.

This first flight today is part of a contract totaling approximately $8 million.