The GRACE mission was selected as the second mission under the NASA Earth System Science Pathfinder (ESSP) Program in May 1997. Launching in March of 2002, the GRACE mission will accurately map variations in the Earth's gravity field over its 5-year lifetime. The GRACE mission will have two identical spacecrafts flying about 220 kilometers apart in a polar orbit 500 kilometers above the Earth.

GRACE will be able to map the Earth's gravity fields by making accurate measurements of the distance between the two satellites, using GPS and a microwave ranging system. It will provide scientists from all over the world with an efficient and cost-effective way to map the Earth's gravity fields with unprecedented accuracy. The results from this mission will yield crucial information about the distribution and flow of mass within the Earth and it's surroundings.

The gravity variations that GRACE will study include: changes due to surface and deep currents in the ocean; runoff and ground water storage on land masses; exchanges between ice sheets or glaciers and the oceans; and variations of mass within the Earth. Another goal of the mission is to create a better profile of the Earth's atmosphere. The results from GRACE will make a huge contribution to the goals of NASA's Earth Science Enterprise, Earth Observation System (EOS) and global climate change studies.

GRACE is a joint partnership between the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) in the United States and Deutsche Forschungsanstalt für Luft und Raumfahrt (DLR) in Germany. Dr. Byron Tapley of The University of Texas Center for Space Research (UTCSR) is the Principal Investigator (PI), and Frank Flechtner of the GeoForschungsZentrum (GFZ) Potsdam is the Co-Principal Investigator (Co-PI). Project management and systems engineering activities are carried out by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.