Exploring Where Earth's Weather Meets Space Weather

The Ionospheric Connection Explorer (ICON), the newest addition to NASA’s fleet of Heliophysics satellites, launched on October 10, 2019 at 9:59 p.m. EDT. Led by UC Berkeley, scientists and engineers around the world came together to make ICON a reality.

The goal of the ICON mission is to understand the tug-of-war between Earth’s atmosphere and the space environment. In the "no mans land" of the ionosphere, a continuous struggle between solar forcing and Earth’s weather systems drive extreme and unpredicted variability. ICON will investigate the forces at play in the near-space environment, leading the way in understanding disturbances that can lead to severe interference with communications and GPS signals.

Mission Operations News

Mission Operations News

ICON Temperatures Updated to Version 6, Now Available

Colin Triplett 0 43

The MIGHTI temperature product (L2.3) has been updated to version 6 (v06) and is currently available for the full mission on the ICON FTP site and at SPDF. 

With this version update, the MIGHTI-A and MIGHTI-B temperature data are both more rigorously tested to ensure continuity across the solar terminator. Also, the top of the daytime MIGHTI-A temperature profiles is now 135 km, up from 127 km in previous versions. Links to the data products are provided here:

ICON FTP MIGHTI

CDAWeb MIGHTI-A

CDAWeb MIGHTI-B

Prior to using these data, please review the data product documentation here:

ICON FTP Temperature V06 Documentation

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Latest News

News

Strong Winds Power Electric Fields in the Upper Atmosphere, NASA’s ICON Finds

Karin Hauck 0 1720

[NASA Feature by Lina Tran on Nov 29 2021]

What happens on Earth doesn’t stay on Earth.

Using observations from NASA’s ICON mission, scientists presented the first direct measurements of Earth’s long-theorized dynamo on the edge of space: a wind-driven electrical generator that spans the globe 60-plus miles above our heads. The dynamo churns in the ionosphere, the electrically charged boundary between Earth and space. It’s powered by tidal winds in the upper atmosphere that are faster than most hurricanes and rise from the lower atmosphere, creating an electrical environment that can affect satellites and technology on Earth.

The new work, published [Nov 29 2021] in Nature Geoscience, improves our understanding of the ionosphere, which helps scientists better predict space weather and protect our technology from its effects.

 

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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