Picture a lander dropping toward Mars with no idea whether a dust storm is building over its landing zone. For decades, that is how it has worked. Forecasting the Martian weather has meant piecing together snapshots from a handful of aging orbiters, which Beyond Tmrw, a space-industry site, called useful but never enough.
NASA wants to change that, and in June 2026 it picked Relativity Space to help. The rocket company, now led by former Google chief Eric Schmidt, is to deliver a science orbiter in 2028 carrying NASA’s Aeolus instruments.
Four instruments, one daily picture
Aeolus is a four-instrument suite built at NASA’s Ames center. It contains a Doppler wind and temperature sounder, a limb sounder, surface radiometric sensors and a wide-field camera. Together they are meant to produce the first unified daily global picture of Martian winds, temperatures, dust and clouds. A companion radar is to map ice and geology under the surface.
Researchers have pursued the idea since at least 2017, according to the report. What is new is how it will get there.
The need is plain on the engineering side. Entry, descent and landing depend on knowing wind shear, temperature gradients and dust loading at the moment of arrival. Existing orbiters like MAVEN and the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter were not built for daily, planet-wide monitoring at the detail landing planners now want. The stakes rise with crews, since astronauts cannot find out about a regional dust event after they have committed to a descent path.
The deal
Under a six-year reimbursable Space Act Agreement, NASA supplies the science payload and the data-processing software. Relativity owns the spacecraft, runs cruise operations and launches on its reusable Terran R vehicle. The company says it will pay for the ride itself, and the report says an unnamed backer is funding the mission.
NASA plans to operate the instruments for at least one Martian year, roughly 687 Earth days, while Relativity looks after the health of the spacecraft. Administrator Jared Isaacman described the model as world-class government instruments paired with commercial speed and private capital, a “force multiplier.”
Company executives, the report says, see the orbiter doubling as a communications relay for surface assets. They describe relay infrastructure designed to run AI workloads in Mars orbit, with onboard computers preprocessing data before optical links send results to Earth. The Aeolus flight anchors a new Interplanetary Sciences Program.
A company that has not yet reached orbit
Relativity entered the launch market promising 3D-printed rockets built faster than conventional ones. Its Terran 1 flew in 2023 and reached space before the second stage failed, so the flight showed the manufacturing approach could get hardware off the pad but did not prove reliable orbit insertion. Schmidt became chief executive in March 2025.
Skepticism is warranted, Beyond Tmrw argued. Relativity has not placed a payload in orbit, let alone flown a Mars transfer, and Terran R’s first flight is targeted for late 2026. Relativity must show it can handle cruise navigation, Mars orbit insertion, instrument commissioning and multi-year relay duty. Failure at any stage would be felt across the commercial deep-space business, where Impulse Space, Firefly and others are pitching similar ride-share ideas.
