Exploring Where Earth's Weather Meets Space Weather

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.

It’s about a year until ICON launches, and all teams—science, instruments, mission operations and modeling teams—are moving forward with laser focus. There is little time to rest when so much goes into making a NASA satellite ready for launch in June 2017.  Systems need to be tested to ensure they can download and process the data that ICON will be generating nearly continuously, orbit after orbit, in Earth’s upper atmosphere. Current data processing testing is making use of the data that the flight instruments are already producing as they undergo ground testing—it's a great way to see how everything's flowing through the data pipeline.  In fact, the mission and instrument operations teams worked together recently to perform a “day in the life” test with the instruments, where they ran them through a 24 hour long sequence of commands, to simulate what they will do over a full day's worth of orbits.