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.

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Research Into ICON Data Goes On

Karin Hauck 0 259

In December of 2021, ICON successfully completed the observations necessary for meeting the objectives of its mission. For almost another year, the observatory and its four instruments continued to acquire a wealth of data, including a remarkable look at a very deep solar minimum and the effect of the Tonga volcanic eruption on Earth's upper atmosphere. An extension for ICON’s mission was planned, but contact with the spacecraft was lost on November 25th.  We continue to focus on the data that ICON acquired during those thousand days. Keep an eye on the updates and look at the Level 4 data products here. We continue to track the publications of our own team and external researchers here. If you know of a research publication that uses ICON data and it is not on our list, please let us know!

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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