The Space Sciences Lab had the great pleasure of hosting this fantastic group of social media bloggers all day on June 13 for a "NASA Social" featuring ICON. A NASA Social event is an informal meeting of people who engage with NASA social media accounts. After applying for media credentials and being vetted by NASA, they have the opportunity to go behind-the-scenes at NASA facilities and events and speak with scientists, engineers, technicians and managers, and they tweet and post to their respective social media along the way. Our closest NASA Social visitor came from San Jose UC Berkeley and the farthest from Colombia, South America; a YouTuber came from Montreal. Their day at SSL began with talks and close interaction with the ICON team and the ICON life-size payload model. The afternoon included a special tour of mission operations and an opportunity to get close to the 11-meter satellite dish during a data pass.

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.