| Title | NASA is Finally Poised to Launch a Satellite to Better Understand Space Weather | |
| Date | Friday October 11 2019, @11:42PM | |
| Author | janrinok | |
| Topic | ||
| from the metmen-in-space? dept. | ||
Submitted via IRC for SoyCow1337
The mission is named ICON — for Ionospheric Connection Explorer — and it was originally supposed to launch in the summer of 2017. However, technical issues with the rocket, called Pegasus, forced the launch to be put on hold for the last two years. Now, Northrop Grumman, which operates the Pegasus system, says the rocket is ready to fly after making a few modifications to the vehicle and performing a variety of qualification tests.
If ICON finally gets off the ground this week, scientists are particularly eager about what the satellite might tell us about Earth's mysterious ionosphere — a huge layer of our planet's atmosphere that begins 30 miles up and spans all the way to 600 miles high. This part of our planet's atmosphere overlaps with the boundary of space and is responsible for what is known as space weather. It's here where charged particles streaming from the Sun interact with particles in our atmosphere, charging them up and creating strange phenomena such as the aurora and geomagnetic storms.
"What we know about the ionosphere is that it really changes from one day to the next quite a bit."
The challenge, though, is that scientists have a hard time forecasting how the ionosphere is going to behave. "What we know about the ionosphere is that it really changes from one day to the next quite a bit," Thomas Immel, the principal investigator for ICON at the University of California Berkeley, tells The Verge. "And the other thing we know is that those changes are hard to predict."
That's a problem since space weather events can have a very real impact on electronics and systems here on Earth. Various satellites fly through the ionosphere, as well as astronauts on the International Space Station. GPS signals also travel through this region. Disturbances in the ionosphere can muck up these signals and equipment and even disrupt our power grid on the surface below.
One way to help predict space weather is to image the Sun and understand its activity, which NASA is doing with various missions like the Parker Solar Probe. But right now, it's still difficult to know how the atmosphere will respond to solar events. And that makes it hard to plan for storms and other weird space weather behavior. "You would be sort of surprised at how poorly you could sort of plan your days if you didn't know the weather tomorrow," says Immel, "which is something of our situation with the ionosphere."
To better understand this enigmatic area of space, the ICON mission team is sending the satellite right into the thick of things. The vehicle is going to an altitude of about 360 miles, just above the peak of this atmospheric layer, which is about 120 to 200 miles high, according to Immel. ICON will also circulate Earth at a low latitude over the planet; that's where the ionosphere is densest. "We're focusing on that region because that's where all the action is," says Immel.
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printed from SoylentNews, NASA is Finally Poised to Launch a Satellite to Better Understand Space Weather on 2024-04-29 02:51:11