Two NASA satellites, ICON and GOLD, slated for 2017 launch will focus on edge of space

NASA’s ICON and GOLD missions will take complementary observations of Earth’s ionosphere and upper atmosphere. NASA image.

Scientists at UC Berkeley’s Space Sciences Laboratory are preparing for the 2017 launch of an Earth-orbiting satellite to discover how storms in the atmosphere affect storms in the ionosphere.
The ionosphere is the edge of space where the sun ionizes the air in Earth’s atmosphere to create constantly shifting streams and sheets of charged particles.
The NASA-funded satellite, called the Ionospheric Connection Explorer, or ICON, will complement observations from a sister satellite also scheduled for launch in 2017: the Global Observations of the Limb and Disk, or GOLD. GOLD is being led by the University of Central Florida, though UC Berkeley space scientist Scott England works on both missions.
The complete article by Robert Sanders of Berkeley News is here:
Recently at the annual AGU, American Geophysical Union, meetings in San Francisco, Dr. Thomas Immel Discusses the ICON mission and NRL, Naval Research Labs, MIGHTI instrument. See the video: