Quantum News Nexus

More news on the quantum sensing front from soon-to-be-publicly-traded Infleqtion: The company announced “its role as a collaborator” on NASA’s Quantum Gravity Gradiometer Pathfinder (QGGPf) mission, which is part of an effort led by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) to fly a standalone quantum gravity sensor into space aboard a low Earth orbit satellite for the first time, with the intent to measure the Earth’s gravitational field and its gradients.

This appears to be a follow-up to an announcement from April 2025 in which NASA JPL named Infleqtion and AOSense as its quantum sensor development partners for the project (AOSense, one of the earliest companies in the quantum sensing field, has so far not issued a similar announcement this week, and in fact has not posted a news release to its website since late 2022.)

Infleqtion’s announcement describes the QGGPf mission as having “more than $20 million in contracted mission funding to date… with contributions from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, the University of Texas at Austin, Infleqtion, Monarch Quantum, and Jemba9…”

The mission’s goal, Infleqtion’s release added, is “to demonstrate quantum sensor technologies that could transform how Earth’s gravity is measured from space. The quantum sensor is designed to monitor mass dynamics across the planet’s surface, including changes in water, ice and land, while operating in microgravity, which enables longer interaction times and correspondingly improved measurement sensitivities. As a technology pathfinder, the mission will help inform the design of future science-grade instruments, representing a major step forward in U.S. leadership in space-based quantum sensing and strategic intelligence.”

However, it is going to take a while for this to all play out, as the mission is not expected to launch until 2030. In the meantime, much more should be happening with efforts to put different kinds of quantum sensors and timing devices into space, both in the public sector and private sector. There are likely to be many firsts for space-based quantum sensors in the years to come.

Image: Illustration of quantum gravity sensing from space. (Source: Infleqtion)

Quantum News Nexus is a site from freelance writer and editor Dan O’Shea that covers quantum computing, quantum sensing, quantum networking, quantum-safe security, and more. You can find him on X @QuantumNewsGuy and doshea14@gmail.com.