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 Thermospheric Column O/N2 update - Version 6 and CMAD Draft

Limb and disk retrievals are both available.

Dr. Thomas Immel 0 192

Version 6 of the new limb products is now available on the ICON FTP server and the SPDF website. A draft version of the ICON CMAD is now available on the ICON website that includes detailed descriptions of the O/N2 products, both limb and disk.  Documentation for these products is available through http links (limb and disk) and on the ICON FTP server.

If you are unfamiliar with the Calibration, Measurement, and Algorithms Document, this provides a broad view of the calibration activites and details of the algorithms as they have been updated by the product owners and implemented in the ICON Science Data Center.

This limb product compares well to the disk product that has provided O/N2 for ICON since 2020. When compared, the two retrievals show differences that can be represented by a single offset value, as they co-vary in response to actual changes in O/N2. As with all ICON products, the scientific need is for precision and both of these products meet the mission requirements.

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Claire Raftery
/ Categories: UC Berkeley, Reviews

ICON Passes System Requirements Review

The ICON mission has passed its System Requirements Review, where the flowdown of top level requirements is traced through all aspects of mission implementation. We’ve gotten very good input from our Standing Review Board, whose key concerns become top priorities for the team to close out. Every NASA mission goes through this step on their way to the first design reviews, and we’re able to proceed with confidence that the team has a complete and verifiable set of requirements in hand. ICON has had a great systems engineering effort from the start and the mission, spacecraft and payload teams have been working together for years to get ready for this. Thanks to everyone who worked so hard on this review!
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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