GRACE and GRACE-FO
joint mission of NASA and the German Aerospace Center
The Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) was a joint mission of NASA and the German Aerospace Center (DLR). Twin satellites took detailed measurements of Earth's gravity field anomalies from its launch in March 2002 to the end of its science mission in October 2017. The two satellites were sometimes called Tom and Jerry, a nod to the famous cartoon. The GRACE Follow-On (GRACE-FO) is a continuation of the mission on near-identical hardware, launched in May 2018. On March 19, 2024, NASA announced that the successor to GRACE-FO would be GRACE-Continuity (GRACE-C), to be launched in December 2028.
By measuring gravity anomalies, GRACE showed how mass is distributed around the planet and how it varies over time. Data from the GRACE satellites is an important tool for studying Earth's ocean, geology, and climate. GRACE was a collaborative endeavor involving the Center for Space Research at the University of Texas at Austin, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the German Aerospace Center and Germany's National Research Center for Geosciences, Potsdam. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory was responsible for the overall mission management under the NASA ESSP (Earth System Science Pathfinder) program.
The principal investigator was Byron Tapley of the University of Texas Center for Space Research, and the co-principal investigator is Christoph Reigber of the GeoForschungsZentrum (GFZ) Potsdam.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “GRACE and GRACE-FO” is joint mission of NASA and the German Aerospace Center. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through GRACE, GRACE-FO and joint, not as a finished interpretation.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 2, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q704319. VIAF identifies the subject as 153803937. The Library of Congress control number is n2003006708. None of the 7 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2002, 2017, 2018 and 2024.
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This entry incorporates text from “GRACE and GRACE-FO” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.