SpaceX launching NASA's TRACERS mission to protect Earth from space weather July 23 after delay: How to watch live

NASA's TRACERS mission is set to blast off from California's Vandenberg Space Force Base on Wednesday (July 23), after a 24-hour delay caused by an airspace closure.

TRACERS (Tandem Reconnection and Cusp Electrodynamics Reconnaissance Satellites) is composed of twin satellites that will study how surges in the solar wind trigger magnetic reconnection in Earth's magnetosphere; such reconnection leads to charged particles being funneled down the magnetic cusps over the poles, sparking auroral lights and geomagnetic storms. By having two satellites in close proximity to one another, TRACERS will be able to see how areas of Earth's magnetic field that are undergoing reconnection — the snapping and recombining of field lines — change over short time frames. This reconnection happens as activity between the sun's solar wind (a continual stream of charged particles from our star) occasionally moves around denser patches stemming from coronal mass ejections. Meanwhile, Earth's magnetic field waxes and wanes during this process.

You can watch the TRACERS launch on SpaceX's website and X account, with the 57-minute launch window opening at 2:13 p.m. EDT (1813 GMT; 11:13 a.m. local California time). We will also be carrying the stream right here on Space.com. It will start 15 minutes prior to the launch window opening.

An illustration of two boxy satellites with long antennae floating above Earth in space — An artist's impression of the twin TRACERS spacecraft in orbit above Earth. (Image credit: University of Iowa/Andy Kale.)

SpaceX and NASA had originally targeted Tuesday (July 22) for the liftoff but called that attempt off due to concerns about crowded airspace over Vandenberg.

TRACERS will launch to low Earth orbit, targeting an altitude of 367 miles (590 kilometers), on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket alongside three additional NASA missions. These include the Athena EPIC (Economical Payload Integration Cost) SmallSat, which will demonstrate a new way of more efficiently placing remote-sensing (or rather, Earth-observing) instruments into orbit.

Another mission flying on the same Falcon 9 rocket is the Polylingual Experimental Terminal, which is a new technology that will demonstrate how spacecraft can roam between communication networks in space, improving satellite connectivity.

Two metal satellites wrapped in fabric sit on two carts behind yellow tape in a factory — The twin TRACERS spacecraft in the clean room at Vandenberg Space Force Base. (Image credit: Millennium Space Systems.)

Finally, a cubesat called the Relativistic Electron Atmospheric Loss (REAL) mission will explore how high-energy particles in Earth's Van Allen radiation belts are scattered into the atmosphere, with the aim of eventually mimicking this natural scattering to remove potentially harmful particles from getting in the way of satellites and damaging their circuitry.

Editor's note: This story was updated at 2:15 p.m. ET on July 22 with the new launch date of July 23.

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Keith Cooper is a freelance science journalist and editor in the United Kingdom, and has a degree in physics and astrophysics from the University of Manchester. He's the author of "The Contact Paradox: Challenging Our Assumptions in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence" (Bloomsbury Sigma, 2020) and has written articles on astronomy, space, physics and astrobiology for a multitude of magazines and websites.

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