NASA and Northrop Grumman have postponed ICON's launch. During a ferry transit, Northrop Grumman saw off-nominal data from the Pegasus rocket. While ICON remains healthy, the mission will return to Vandenberg Air Force Base in California for rocket testing and data analysis.A new launch date will be determined at a later date.

By Robert Sanders, UC Berkeley Media relations | June 1, 2018

If scientists hope to predict the magnetic storms around Earth that endanger satellites and interfere with radio communications on the ground, they must understand how tropical storms on Earth affect these magnetic storms 60 miles above our heads.

A new mission, NASA’s Ionospheric Connection Explorer (ICON), is charged with that very task: to measure the winds of ionized atoms at the edge of space and determine how they are impacted by atmospheric weather, in particular seasonal monsoons in the tropics.

In preparation for launch, the ICON EUV instrument recently went through a week long "scrub" activity at the Orbital ATK facility in Gilbert, Arizona. The detector in EUV is a microchannel plate (MCP), and the millions of tiny tubes in the MCP can develop different characteristics during all the testing done on the ground, and overall become less effective. The scrub involves running the detector at high voltage while it is illuminated by a bright EUV light source, which cleans off any molecules that weren’t there at the start of all that testing. When done for a sufficient amount of time (a week, in this case), the detector develops a more uniform and stable amplification, just like when it was new. It’s like a drink from the fountain of youth for the MCP.

ICON and GOLD missions will study Earth's little-understood upper atmosphere. Here are some recent science and technology articles that have featured both missions, as the GOLD launch approaches in late January and ICON later this year:

• For the first time, a NASA mission to study space weather will live on a commercial satellite  in The Verge (technology news). This article quotes ICON principal investigator Thomas Immel.
• NASA launches a mission to study Earth’s final frontier—the edge of space in Ars Technica (technology and science news)
• New NASA mission will explore key zone between Earth and space at CNN (headline news)
• Looking ahead: space missions for 2018 at Sky and Telescope (astronomy news)