NASA/SpaceX TRACERS Booster Landing

A SpaceX Falcon 9 first stage booster lands on Landing Zone 4 following liftoff of NASA’s TRACERS (Tandem Reconnection and Cusp Electrodynamics Reconnaissance Satellites) mission at Space Launch Complex  4 East at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California on Wednesday, July 23, 2025. This was the 16th flight for the first stage booster, which has previously launched these NASA missions - PACE (Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud, ocean Ecosystem, NASA’s SpaceX Crew-7, and Commercial Resupply Services-29. The TRACERS mission will study magnetic reconnection around Earth — a process in which electrically charged plasmas exchange energy in the atmosphere — to understand how the Sun’s solar wind interacts with the magnetosphere, Earth’s protective magnetic shield.