With approximately 24,000 attendees in 2015, AGU’s Fall Meeting is the largest Earth and space science meeting in the world.

Here are ICON-related sessions, poster sessions and a press conference:

Monday, 12 December 2016

SA11A-01: The Ionospheric Connection Explorer (ICON) : Mission Design and Planning

08:00 – 08:15     Moscone West - 2016    Authors: Immel et. al.

The Ionospheric Connection Explorer is NASA's next Explorer mission, with a primary scientific goal of understanding the source of the extreme variability in Earth's ionosphere. The observatory is scheduled to be delivered to the Pegasus launch vehicle in early 2017 for a June launch. ICON carries unprecedented capability to orbit in a broader national and international effort to understand changes in our space environment occurring on a wide range of spatial and temporal scales. Here, we will discuss plans for the observatory checkout and early operations, and discuss the observing conditions expected in the atmosphere and ionosphere at that time. The status of the science data pipeline and the predicted performance of the observatory for scientific measurements will be discussed.

AN NSF-supported meeting at the High Altitude Observatory in Boulder CO at the end of September is drawing participants from around the globe. Over 80 participants -- and counting -- have registered for the GEOGOLDICON conference bringing together satellite and ground-based missions exploring Earth’s near-space environment, as well as others interested in observation and analysis opportunities. (The name comes from the combination of ICON and GOLD missions and NSF Geospace). Collaborations forged at the meeting will allow leverage of each other’s work and broad participation in the investigation of long-standing mysteries and challenges, such as what effect Earth’s weather has on space weather.  The meeting is free and the invitation extended to the solar, heliospheric, magnetospheric and atmospheric communities.

Read more about the GEOGOLDICON conference.

You can also read ICON’s submitted papers.

It’s about a year until ICON launches, and all teams—science, instruments, mission operations and modeling teams—are moving forward with laser focus. There is little time to rest when so much goes into making a NASA satellite ready for launch in June 2017.  Systems need to be tested to ensure they can download and process the data that ICON will be generating nearly continuously, orbit after orbit, in Earth’s upper atmosphere. Current data processing testing is making use of the data that the flight instruments are already producing as they undergo ground testing—it's a great way to see how everything's flowing through the data pipeline.  In fact, the mission and instrument operations teams worked together recently to perform a “day in the life” test with the instruments, where they ran them through a 24 hour long sequence of commands, to simulate what they will do over a full day's worth of orbits.

The team working on ICON’s payload had a party over the weekend to commemorate their working together for the past year and their “empty nester” status now that the instrument has gone to Utah (Space Dynamics Lab) for testing and integration. UC Berkeley Electrical Engineer and party host Dorothy Gordon ordered the festive ICON cake from a local bakery. She said, “I had a great time working with the ICON-ICP (instrument control package) team and just wanted to get them all together again before we all drift off.” The send-off after their intensive work together takes place one year before ICON launches, so the cake could also be an “anti-birthday cake” celebrating ICON’s minus-one birthday!