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.

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.

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.

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.

The AGU Fall Meeting will be one of the world's largest virtual scientific conferences, with exciting programming and events. #AGU20 is scheduled from 1-17 December. Scientific program content will be available on-demand, with pre-recorded oral presentations and virtual posters available for attendees to view and peruse outside of the scheduled live Q&A sessions during the meeting.

Click "read more" to see a PDF of ICON science-related sessions, posters, and the SPA Town Hall on Wednesday night, Dec. 9.