Infleqtion Receives $20 Million NASA Follow-On Award for Quantum Gravity Pathfinder

Infleqtion announced that NASA has awarded the Louisville, Colorado, company a $20 million (€17.2 million) follow-on contract to continue development of the Quantum Gravity Gradiometer Pathfinder (QGGPf). The mission, led by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, is designed to fly the first space-based quantum gravity sensor. The award brings NASA’s investment in the program to $40 million (€34.3 million) and moves the project into the next phase of hardware development and testing.

Atomic Physics Package and Testing

QGGPf is designed to demonstrate quantum sensor technologies that measure Earth’s surface gravity from orbit. The pathfinder builds on NASA’s GRACE and GRACE-FO gravity-mapping missions and on work by JPL and Infleqtion on the Cold Atom Lab aboard the International Space Station. Gravity gradiometers compare how test masses accelerate over a short baseline. Those differentials map mass anomalies associated with water, ice, and subsurface density structure.

Infleqtion’s role covers design, maturation, and integration of the atomic physics package, the quantum core of the sensor, including vacuum, laser, and control subsystems. The cold-atom system uses ultracold rubidium atoms cooled to the pico-kelvin scale to support direct gravity-gradient measurements from space. In this contract phase, Infleqtion will build an initial sensor head and electronics engineering development unit and test it at the Einstein-Elevator, a drop-tower microgravity facility at Leibniz University Hannover in Germany.

NASA has described QGGPf as a compact atom-interferometer instrument that uses two clouds of ultracold rubidium atoms as test masses. JPL materials place the pathfinder payload near 0.25 cubic meters in volume and about 125 kilograms in mass, smaller than classical space gravity instruments. A 2025 paper in EPJ Quantum Technology outlines how a later science-grade quantum gravity gradiometer could provide single-spacecraft mass-change data at comparable or better resolutions to GRACE-FO.

Pathfinder Timeline and Mission Scope

Matt Kinsella, chief executive officer of Infleqtion, said the follow-on award reflects progress toward the mission’s next phase and the multi-year engineering path from laboratory quantum sensing to a flight system. Dana Anderson, chief science officer, said the work is shifting from testing the quantum technology itself to operating it in the space environment. NASA conceived the project as a U.S. industry contribution to a JPL-led pathfinder for later science-grade instruments.

NASA and Infleqtion plan to complete the instrument hardware development, with work under this phase expected through 2027, followed by a flight demonstration. The mission is expected to launch aboard a low-Earth orbit spacecraft in 2030. As a technology pathfinder, QGGPf is intended to reduce risk for later high-resolution quantum gravity instruments that could track shifts in surface and underground water, ice, and natural resources.

Infleqtion frames the work within its space and frontier sensing portfolio, which also includes quantum computing, optical clocks, RF receivers, and inertial sensors for government and commercial customers.

Bottom Line

The $20 million NASA follow-on funds Infleqtion’s quantum gravity sensor hardware toward a planned 2030 pathfinder flight.

Find out more here.

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