If you look up at the sky over the Atlantic Ocean on the 9th of October, 9:30 PM EDT, you might just see NASA's Ionospheric Connection Explorer or, simply, ICON take off on the Pegasus XL rocket by Northrop Grumman. If you are unable to be there in person, here's where you can watch the live coverage of the briefing and the launch.
In April 2013, NASA chose a new satellite mission and space-based instrument to begin development as part of the agency's Heliophysics Explorer Program. These ventures will cater to space observations that aim to study the Earth's ionosphere and thermosphere.
The project was given to the University of California, Berkeley (UCB), and they were awarded a contract to assemble a satellite that will determine how Earth's weather disturbs the weather at the edge of space—in hopes of improving forecasts of extreme "space weather." ICON was designed, built, and operated by scientists at UCB and Space Sciences Laboratory.
ICON will explore the perimeters dividing Earth and space—the ionosphere—in an attempt to understand the connection between our atmosphere and the space environment just beyond. Neutral gas and ionized plasma collide in this area, and the resulting reactions exhibit highly noteworthy and fast-paced changes that affect space-based technological systems like GPS and satellites in general.
The ionosphere has long been known to respond to "space weather" drivers from the sun. But previous missions by NASA have stunned many in showing that these dramatic changes in space weather often occur in sync with the weather within the Earth's atmosphere. ICON will study the significance of these two drivers as they exert change on the space environment that surrounds the Earth.
This explorer is the first space mission to simultaneously observe all properties of the system, watching the interplay of neutral gas and ionized plasm—the dynamic and chemical coupling of our atmosphere and the immediate ionosphere. ICON accomplishes this through a contemporary measurement technique, combining remote optical imaging and measurements obtained through direct contact with the plasma. With this process, ICON has the ability to separate the drivers and identify the true cause of ionospheric variability, understand how energy and momentum from the lower atmosphere propagate into the space environment, and finally, explain how these components set for the extreme conditions of solar-driven magnetic storms.
Its imaging capacity, together with its in-situ measurements on the same spacecraft, provides an angle of the coupled system that would contrarily have to involve two or more orbiting observatories.
The explorer targets the low-latitude ionosphere for its recent global-scale observations of this region display exceptional spatial and temporal variability that go beyond the boundaries of the conventional view of ion-neutral coupling in space. The pairing of the atmosphere to space is strongest at these latitudes because the atmospheric waves are at their largest.
It will study the frontier of the space—the dynamic zone in our atmosphere where terrestrial weather from below meets space weather above. The ionosphere can be a source of great exploration but can also be disruptive to radio communications and satellites, and most importantly, astronaut health. ICON will help determine the physical processes at play in the ionosphere and pave the way for mitigating its effects on our technology, communications systems, and society.
