ICON & GOLD Teaming Up to Explore Earth's Interface to Space:

eHam.net News - Like Earth, space has weather. Except instead of swirling winds and downpours of precipitation, space weather is defined by shifting electric and magnetic fields and rains of charged particles. 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. Above the ozone layer, the ionosphere is a part of Earth's atmosphere where particles have been cooked into a sea of electrically-charged electrons and ions by the Sun's radiation. The ionosphere is comingled with the very highest -- and quite thin -- layers of Earth's neutral upper atmosphere, making this region an area that is constantly in flux undergoing the push-and-pull between Earth's conditions and those in space. Increasingly, these layers of near-Earth space are part of the human domain, as it's home not only to astronauts, but to radio signals used to guide airplanes and ships, and satellites that provide our communications and GPS systems. Understanding the fundamental processes that govern our upper atmosphere and ionosphere is crucial to improve situational awareness that helps protect astronauts, spacecraft and humans on the ground. Two new NASA missions are teaming up to explore this little-understood area that's close to home but historically hard to observe. The Global-scale Observations of the Limb and Disk, or GOLD, instrument launches aboard a commercial communications satellite in January 2018, and the Ionospheric Connection Explorer, or ICON, spacecraft launches later in 2018. Together, they will provide the most comprehensive observations of the ionosphere we've ever had. The two missions provide distinct but complementary perspectives: ICON, in low-Earth orbit, flies directly through and just above regions of interest, capturing detailed remote and in situ data on the forces that shape this area. GOLD, in geostationary orbit over the Western Hemisphere, will build up a full-disk view of the ionosphere and upper atmosphere every half hour, providing detailed large-scale measurements of related processes -- a cadence which makes it the first mission to be able to monitor the true weather of the upper atmosphere, rather than the longer cycles of its climate. GOLD is also able to focus in on a tighter region and scan more quickly, to complement additional research plans as needed.

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