ICON Begins Study of Region Where Earth, Space Weather Meet
By Bob Granath
A GPS can be a handy navigation tool when driving along an unfamiliar route to a new destination. But confusion could quickly result if a disturbance in space weather causes a loss of signal from the satellite providing the crucial directions.
NASA’s new Ionospheric Connection Explorer, or ICON, satellite will provide scientists and meteorologists with a better understanding of the dynamic zone high in the atmosphere where terrestrial weather meets weather in space. This is the area through which radio communications and GPS signals travel. Changes in weather can effect both.
At 9:59 p.m. EDT on Oct. 10, 2019, NASA launched ICON on a Northrop Grumman Pegasus XL rocket. It was carried aloft by the company’s L-1011 Stargazer aircraft which took off from the Skid Strip at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida.
“ICON has an important job to do – to help us understand the dynamic space environment near our home,” said Nicola Fox, director for heliophysics at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “ICON will be the first mission to simultaneously track what’s happening in Earth’s upper atmosphere and in space to see how the two interact, causing the kind of changes that can disrupt our communications systems.”
Both the ICON satellite and Pegasus XL rocket were processed at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. The assembled rocket then was attached to the Stargazer aircraft and flown to the Cape. The Stargazer is a mobile launch platform and the only one of its kind in the world.
Northrop Grumman produces the Pegasus XL, a small expendable rocket that attaches beneath the aircraft. On launch day, the Stargazer jet takes off and requires about an hour to fly to the rocket’s launch altitude of 39,000 feet, about 50 miles offshore of Daytona Beach, Florida.
At launch time, the Pegasus XL was released and, five seconds later, the first stage motor fired accelerating the rocket toward orbit.
Nearly 10 minutes after release, the Pegasus XL exhausted each of its three stage motors, reaching a top speed of nearly 17,000 mph. Following the boost phase, the spacecraft separated from the Pegasus and glided off to begin its mission in orbit 360 miles above the Earth.
The mission is in response to recent scientific discovery that the ionosphere, positioned at the edge of space, is significantly influenced by storms in Earth’s lower atmosphere. Pressure differences created by weather near Earth’s surface can spread into the highest reaches of the upper atmosphere and influence the winds in this region.
The ionosphere’s response to conditions on Earth and in space has proven difficult to pin down and remains a mystery that NASA hopes ICON will solve.
The fluctuations in the ionosphere can disrupt satellite and radio communications from orbiting communications spacecraft, creating a direct impact on the nation’s economy.
Scientists believe ICON will help determine the physics of the space environment and improve the forecasts of extreme space weather by probing the variability of Earth’s ionosphere with in-situ and remote-sensing instruments.
Northrop Grumman in Dulles, Virginia, designed, built, integrated and tested ICON under a contract from the University of California Berkeley’s Space Sciences Laboratory that leads the mission.
“We put as much capability on this satellite that could possibly fit on the payload deck,” said Thomas Immel, the principal investigator for ICON at the University of California, Berkeley. “All those instruments are focused on the ionosphere in a completely new science mission that starts now.”
ICON is a part of NASA’s Explorer Program managed by the agency’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, for the Science Mission Directorate in Washington. Explorer-class missions are principal investigator led, relatively moderate cost and small- to medium-sized spacecraft capable of being built, tested and launched in a short period.
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