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GRACE Program

GRACE (Gravity Recovery And Climate Experiment) was a completed NASA-led Earth-observation program launched on 17 March 2002 in partnership with Germany’s DLR. Its twin spacecraft measured tiny changes in the distance between them to map Earth’s changing gravity field and reveal the movement and storage of water, ice, ocean mass, groundwater, and solid-Earth mass. GRACE science operations concluded in October 2017, establishing a foundational mass-change record continued by GRACE-FO.

GRACE Program
NASA Science, GRACE spacecraft icon · NASA content is generally available for factual educational or informational use under NASA media-usage guidelines, with NASA acknowledged and no NASA/JPL/Caltech/partner endorsement implied. The source is NASA Science’s spacecraft icon collection, where this asset is labeled the GRACE spacecraft icon; NASA identifiers and insignia remain separately protected. This unmodified spacecraft identity image is used factually for the GRACE Program record. · Source

Identity

Aliases
GRACEGravity Recovery And Climate ExperimentGravity Recovery and Climate Experiment MissionGRACE Mission
Domains
spaceflight
Name
GRACE Program
Status
completed
Types
scienceresearchoperations

Details

Description
GRACE (Gravity Recovery And Climate Experiment) was a completed NASA-led Earth-observation program launched on 17 March 2002 in partnership with Germany’s DLR. Its twin spacecraft measured tiny changes in the distance between them to map Earth’s changing gravity field and reveal the movement and storage of water, ice, ocean mass, groundwater, and solid-Earth mass. GRACE science operations concluded in October 2017, establishing a foundational mass-change record continued by GRACE-FO.
Leads
Participants
Start Date
2002-03-17

Assets & Meta

Creation Time
August 13, 2026 at 18:03:08 UTC
Updated Time
August 23, 2026 at 00:29:44 UTC
Image
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Other

Official Urls
https://science.nasa.gov/mission/grace/https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/missions/gravity-recovery-and-climate-experiment-grace/https://grace.jpl.nasa.gov/news/95/prolific-earth-gravity-satellites-end-science-mission/