NASA’s ICON mission to explore where Earth’s weather meets space weather launched Thursday.
The Ionospheric Connection Explorer, or ICON, will measure the highest region of the atmosphere where Earth weather interacts with space weather. Initially scheduled to go up Wednesday, it’s now set to launch Thursday from a Pegasus XL rocket dropped from modified L-1011 carrier plane over the Atlantic Ocean at 9:30 p.m. EST. You can watch a live feed of the launch below beginning at 9:15 p.m. ET.
The mission 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.
