SPRG Seminars
September 10, 2013:
"The Ionospheric Connection Explorer : A New NASA Mission to Geospace"
Tom Immel, Space Sciences Laboratory, University of California at Berkeley
ICON is the latest Heliophysics to be selected for development, with a planned launch in 2017 to investigate the region of space nearest Earth: the ionosphere. UC Berkeley is leading this mission, with a great deal of the engineering and scientific effort coming from Space Sciences Laboratory. The effort includes two instruments to be built at Berkeley, as well as one coming from each of our partners at Naval Research Laboratory and U. Texas at Dallas. Upon launch, SSL will also operate the observatory and produce nearly all of the science products. I will discuss the scientific mission and the remarkable variability in Earth's plasma environment that is the focus of the investigation. The possibility of collaborative efforts with other space-borne missions including GOLD, SWARM, and COSMIC-2 holds promise to resolve a great deal of the open questions regarding how our ionosphere and atmosphere interact.