August 3, 2026 — The Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum in Washington now includes a model of a Southwest Research Institute-built Cyclone Global Navigation Satellite System (CYGNSS) microsatellite. The model is a part of a permanent exhibit at the museum showing the evolution of spacecraft over several decades. SwRI designed, built and continues to operate the constellation of CYGNSS microsatellites for University of Michigan’s College of Engineering.
“CYGNSS’s eight satellites were the first built by SwRI, and seeing the breadth of the mission’s impact has been very rewarding,” said Susan Pope, executive director of SwRI’s Space Science Division, who also served as CYGNSS’s deputy project manager from 2013 to 2016.
“In science and engineering, we say one person’s noise is another person’s signal. CYGNSS’s original mission was to understand the intensity of hurricanes and improve forecasting, but we’ve also been able to use it for things like tracking flooding in Houston and mapping surface water in the Amazon Basin.”
Launched in 2016, the CYGNSS constellation’s mission is to improve tropical storm and hurricane forecasting. Each of the CYGNSS microsatellites are roughly the size of a piece of carry-on luggage and designed to make frequent measurements of ocean surface winds and to monitor the location, intensity, size and development of tropical cyclones. Flying in formation, the spacecraft cover an orbital swath that passes over most of the Earth’s hurricane-producing zone — 35 degrees north and south of the Equator.
“CYGNSS was a milestone for SwRI and for the space industry,” said William Wells, CYGNSS’s project systems engineer, who has been a part of the mission since the proposal phase. “We created eight spacecraft, doing amazing science at a low cost point. It paved the way for small satellites to have a larger presence in our industry, and it led to a wide range of interesting science in the past 10 years. I hope this helps people see that doing something innovative can reap amazing benefits.”
SwRI assembled the display model from leftover spare parts from the original CYGNSS mission and engineering model components. The model represents the external structural skeleton of the microsatellite.
“CYGNSS is a big part of the small satellite revolution, and I always say we’re small but mighty,” said CYGNSS Project Manager Jillian Redfern, an assistant director in SwRI’s Solar System Science and Exploration Division in Boulder, Colorado. “It was remarkable to start seeing CYGNSS data used in so many scientific studies, including tracking locust migrations in Africa, microplastics in oceans and wildfires. We’re very proud of how productive these little satellites have proven to be in the last decade.”
The model is displayed in the museum’s “RTX Living in the Space Age” exhibition, which will provide insight into space hardware and infrastructure that are largely invisible to the public but have a profound impact on daily life. Some other key artifacts will represent the Hubble Space Telescope, Skylab, Standard Missile-3 and several generations of EVA (extravehicular activity) spacesuits.
“It is an honor and quite wonderful for CYGNSS to be commemorated in this way by the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum,” said Dr. Chris Ruf, the Frederick Bartman Collegiate Professor of Climate and Space Science at the University of Michigan and principal investigator of the CYGNSS mission. “The mission made impacts in space technology by demonstrating the high-quality science a microsatellite is capable of. It improved our understanding of hurricane inner core processes and our ability to predict their development. All of these milestones were made possible by SwRI's engineering contributions to the mission, for which I am extremely grateful.”
SwRI offices in San Antonio led the engineering development and management prior to operations. In addition to contributing to spacecraft development, the University of Michigan Climate and Space Sciences and Engineering Department leads the CYGNSS science investigation and manages science operations. The Earth Science Division of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate oversees the mission. SwRI’s Solar System Science and Exploration division in Boulder, Colorado, hosts the mission operations center, which commands the spacecraft, collects the telemetry and transmits the data to the science operations center at the University of Michigan.
For more information, visit Spacecraft Subsystem Assembly and Testing or contact Joanna Quintanilla, +1 210 522 2073, Communications Department, Southwest Research Institute, 6220 Culebra Road, San Antonio, TX 78238-5166.