Mission Operations Update #6 - New Temperature Retrievals

MIGHTI 2.3 product up to Version 5

Dr. Thomas Immel 0 750

An update to the ICON MIGHTI 2.3 product for MLT temperatures is coming shortly to the public FTP site. It includes a number of changes related to the flat field of the instrument when making O2 A-band measurements at 5 different wavelengths. This extends the range of altitudes and solar zenith angles of available temperatures from both MIGHTI A and B, and reduces the differences in results from the two channels. Please see the Documentation online for details of this product update.

UPDATE: v5 of the temperature product is now on the public site.

NASA Rocket, Satellite Tag-Team to View the Giant Electric Current in the Sky

Mission launch timed as ICON passes nearby to compare perspectives on dynamo

Karin Hauck 0 679

by Miles Hatfield, NASA —The Dynamo-2 sounding rocket mission will launch two rockets coordinated with the passing of the ICON satellite overhead to study a churning electric current in the upper atmosphere. The mission is just the latest in a centuries-long quest to understand the atmospheric dynamo, beginning with Michael Faraday’s invention of the electric generator.

Some 50 miles up, where Earth’s atmosphere blends into space, the air itself hums with an electric current. Scientists call it the atmospheric dynamo, an Earth-sized electric generator. It’s taken hundreds of years for scientists to lay the groundwork to understand it, but the principles that keep it running are only just now being revealed in detail. 

Following up on its predecessor’s 2013 flight, the Dynamos, Winds, and Electric Fields in the Daytime Lower Ionosphere-2, or Dynamo-2, sounding rocket mission will soon pierce the atmospheric winds thought to keep the dynamo churning. With the sounding rocket’s launch timed as NASA’s ICON (Ionospheric Connection Explorer) satellite passes nearby, these two space missions will combine their perspectives to advance our understanding of the giant electric circuit in the sky.

Science Data Update: First Hough Mode retrievals coming to the data site

Dr. Thomas Immel 0 1015

ICON is in process of approving the Hough Mode product, the first Level 4 product, available for most of 2020. This product comes in 2 parts; 1) a set of diurnal and semidiurnal tidal amplitudes in a sliding 30-day window for 2020 centered on the day of interest, and 2) a TIEGCM lower boundary specification for the same date.

Update: These files are now all available on the public ftp site

Documentation for each of these components (1, 2) of the product are also available on the FTP site.

Mission Operations Update #4 - New IVM L1 and L2 data now available

Dr. Thomas Immel 0 1300

New IVM Level 2 data (Version 4 of Product 2.7) is now available. This update extends the dataset to the end of 2020 and provide a correction for observed bias in all three velocity components. We recommend that users migrate to these products as soon as they are available. The largest correction is to ram velocities.

The version 3 Level 1IVM data are already approved and available on the FTP site.

Mission Operations Update #3

Winds and UV products all published

Dr. Thomas Immel 0 1095

The MIGHTI 2.1 Line-of-Sight winds and 2.2 Cardinal winds have been updated to v4 and are now available out to November 13 2020. The version resolves a disagreement between the green and red winds that became apparent in the June 2020 timeframe, and extends the set.

RSS
124678910Last
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