NASA to launch GOLD AND ICON to explore Ionosphere
NASA to launch GOLD AND ICON to explore Ionosphere
NASA has announced that it would launch two missions to explore a little-understood area 96 km above Earth’s surface. The Global-scale Observations of the Limb and Disk (GOLD) mission will be launched aboard a commercial communications satellite in January 2018, and the designed spacecraft Ionospheric Connection Explorer (ICON) will be launched later this year.
GOLD and ICON will team up to explore the ionosphere, a boundary area between Earth and the space where particles have been cooked into a sea of electrically-charged electrons and ions by the Sun’s radiation.
Like Earth, space has weather. At the very beginning of space, starting just 60 miles above Earth’s surface, there’s a layer of the atmosphere that shifts and changes in concert with both types of weather.
GOLD specializes in landscapes from its view 22,000 miles above the planet’s surface and ICON — at 350 miles above Earth — captures detailed close-ups. During parts of its orbit, ICON passes through GOLD’s field of view and each mission will get a unique snapshot of the same region. This overlap in their data makes it easier to identify what caused a certain change to the upper atmosphere at a given time.
One shared goal for the missions is to systematically measure weather-related shifts in the upper atmosphere. For the first time, we’ll be able to see how the upper atmosphere changes in response to hurricanes and geomagnetic storms alike.
In addition to working together to determine how different types of energy flow through the upper atmosphere, the two missions also have their own research objectives. GOLD’s science focuses on observing what drives change — the Sun, Earth’s magnetic field and the lower atmosphere — in the upper atmosphere. GOLD is particularly interested in how the upper atmosphere reacts to geomagnetic storms, which are temporary disturbances of Earth’s magnetic field set off by solar activity. During night time, GOLD examines disruptions in the ionosphere — dense, unpredictable bubbles of charged gas that appear over the equator and tropics, sometimes interfering with radio communications.
On the other hand, ICON concentrates on how charged and neutral gases in the upper atmosphere behave and interact. Several forces — including shifts in neutral winds, pressure gradients and solar activity — act on the ionosphere simultaneously; ICON was designed to study each of them individually, making it easier for scientists to elucidate cause-and-effect relationships.
GOLD is led by the University of Central Florida, and the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado Boulder built the instrument. GOLD is a NASA mission of opportunity — an instrument hosted on an otherwise unrelated satellite. GOLD flies in geostationary orbit on a commercial communications satellite, SES-14, built by Airbus for Luxembourg-based satellite operator, SES. GOLD is the first NASA science mission to fly as a hosted payload on a commercial communications satellite.
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