ICON Data Browser Online

Dr. Thomas Immel 0 371

A data browser developed by Dr. Yen-Jung Wu here at SSL allows you to make plots of ICON data very quickly, and once the data are plotted provides a quick link to the file at the NASA repository. 

 

MIGHTI v5 wind product now processing

It's a very exciting update!

Dr. Thomas Immel 0 1107

Version 5 of the MIGHTI thermospheric winds is on its way. We are currently processing all the line of sight winds and once these are approved, will be promoted to the public FTP site and then the NASA archive. This wind product fills some long data gaps bad due to solar contamination. In version 5 the effects of this contamination has been mitigated and most of the data has been recovered. It also un-tethers the zero wind from HWM, using the on-orbit calibration processes to determine zero.

 

What does the MIGHTI instrument do?

What is an interferometer? What will MIGHTI be investigating in Earth's upper atmosphere?

Karin Hauck 0 2992

ICON carries four different instruments to explore Earth's upper atmosphere. The MIGHTI instrument, an example of an interferometer, looks at winds and temperatures in the ionosphere. In this video,  Drs. John Harlander and Chris Englert explain what an interferometer is and what MIGHTI will be investigating.

"The atmosphere naturally just glows at those altitudes, more during the day and less during the night...and by just looking at the color of this airglow, we can find out about the wind and the temperature. So the atmosphere... is helping us to understand how it is behaving by sending out this airglow. If we build the right instruments to look at particular aspects of the color of the airglow, we can get information that we want."
—  Dr. Chris Englert, MIGHTI instrument lead

The MIGHTI Engineering Unit optics integration and vibration test is complete

Claire Raftery 0 4168

ICON’s Michelson Interferometer for Global High-resolution Thermospheric Imaging (MIGHTI) instrument includes two identical optical assemblies, one for each of the perpendicular fields of view that will observe thermospheric wind-vector and temperature profiles. An engineering unit of the optical assembly was completed and successfully vibration tested in June 2015 at the Naval Research Laboratory.

RSS
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