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!

The ICON science team kicked off their effort in a meeting in November 2013. As the ICON instruments and spacecraft take shape, the science team will provide guidance, scientific oversight of the requirements and be developing the science data processing to enable ICON to deliver scientifically valuable products as quickly as possibly after launch. For more information on the team, go here.

Update — NASA has selected ICON to be the next Heliophysics Explorer satellite mission. The Ionospheric Connection Explorer was selected along with a Mission Of Opportunity (GOLD; Global-scale Observations of the Limb and Disk) to move forward into development (Phase B). ICON, to be lead by the University of California, Berkeley will provide NASA’s Heliophysics division with a powerful new capability to determine the conditions in space modified by weather on the planet, and to understand the way space weather events grow to envelop regions of our planet with dense ionospheric plasma.

Link to the official announcement.