ICON's current location. Click here to go to the ICON position plotter tool for other times.

Mission Operations News

ICON Thermospheric Column O/N2 update - Version 6 and CMAD Draft

Limb and disk retrievals are both available.

Dr. Thomas Immel 0 193

Version 6 of the new limb products is now available on the ICON FTP server and the SPDF website. A draft version of the ICON CMAD is now available on the ICON website that includes detailed descriptions of the O/N2 products, both limb and disk.  Documentation for these products is available through http links (limb and disk) and on the ICON FTP server.

If you are unfamiliar with the Calibration, Measurement, and Algorithms Document, this provides a broad view of the calibration activites and details of the algorithms as they have been updated by the product owners and implemented in the ICON Science Data Center.

This limb product compares well to the disk product that has provided O/N2 for ICON since 2020. When compared, the two retrievals show differences that can be represented by a single offset value, as they co-vary in response to actual changes in O/N2. As with all ICON products, the scientific need is for precision and both of these products meet the mission requirements.

ICON Data Browser Online

Dr. Thomas Immel 0 389

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. 

 

Mission Operations Update #3

Winds and UV products all published

Dr. Thomas Immel 0 1256

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.

First ICON Science Data Released to Public

Karin Hauck 0 1795

[by Lina Tran on the NASA blog] On June 22, NASA’s ICON team released scientific data collected during the spacecraft’s first eight months in orbit to the public.

The data release features observations from ICON’s four instruments — MIGHTI, FUV, EUV, and IVM — which have been observing the ins and outs of the ionosphere, the sea of charged particles high in the upper atmosphere. Scientists have been busy parsing the wealth of observations collected by ICON in preparation for the mission’s first science results, which will be released later this year.

“ICON was designed, built, and launched to provide data we had never seen before, and it has not disappointed us in any regard,” said Thomas Immel, ICON principal investigator at University of California, Berkeley. Immel said he was pleased to share ICON’s first data with the world. “The sensitivity and precision of our observations, and the unique orbit and mission design, give us a new and advanced tool for unlocking all the puzzling questions we have had about the connection between Earth’s atmosphere and our space environment.”

The release coincides with the virtual summer meeting of CEDAR, the Coupling, Energetics, and Dynamics of Atmospheric Regions program. The newly released data spans measurements made since the mission’s launch on Oct. 10, 2019. Data can be accessed through University of California Berkeley’s Space Sciences Lab.

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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