Exploring Where Earth's Weather Meets Space Weather

The Ionospheric Connection Explorer (ICON), the newest addition to NASA’s fleet of Heliophysics satellites, launched on October 10, 2019 at 9:59 p.m. EDT. Led by UC Berkeley, scientists and engineers around the world came together to make ICON a reality.

The goal of the ICON mission is to understand the tug-of-war between Earth’s atmosphere and the space environment. In the "no mans land" of the ionosphere, a continuous struggle between solar forcing and Earth’s weather systems drive extreme and unpredicted variability. ICON will investigate the forces at play in the near-space environment, leading the way in understanding disturbances that can lead to severe interference with communications and GPS signals.

Mission Operations News

Mission Operations News

ICON Temperatures Updated to Version 6, Now Available

Colin Triplett 0 181

The MIGHTI temperature product (L2.3) has been updated to version 6 (v06) and is currently available for the full mission on the ICON FTP site and at SPDF. 

With this version update, the MIGHTI-A and MIGHTI-B temperature data are both more rigorously tested to ensure continuity across the solar terminator. Also, the top of the daytime MIGHTI-A temperature profiles is now 135 km, up from 127 km in previous versions. Links to the data products are provided here:

ICON FTP MIGHTI

CDAWeb MIGHTI-A

CDAWeb MIGHTI-B

Prior to using these data, please review the data product documentation here:

ICON FTP Temperature V06 Documentation

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Latest News

News

ICON Ready to Ship

Karin Hauck 0 3803

The ICON mission is proceeding apace. High fives are in order since the team just completed its fourth operational readiness test (ORT). During an ORT, a dozen SSL Mission Operation Team Members join forces with two dozen spacecraft engineers from Orbital ATK to rehearse the first week of activities that will occur during ICON’s launch and early orbit. It’s an entire week of long days and intensive testing in ICON’s Mission Operations Center at the UC Berkeley Space Sciences Lab, to simulate operation of the observatory. Spurred along by the fact that this was the final ORT before launch, the team worked together to bring it to a healthy and successful completion (simulating operations with a failed momentum wheel, no less). The next time these teams come together at SSL will be the actual launch day for ICON.

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ICON skin is based on Greytness by Adammer
Background image, courtesy of NASA, is a derivitave of photograph taken by D. Pettit from the ISS, used under Creative Commons license