Profile: On Your Mark, Get Set, Go! Catching Up with Mark Lewis

Mark Lewis looking at a monitor with a headset on

Mark Lewis is a Mission Operations Manager at the SSL Mission Operations Center (MOC).  Karin Hauck is Communications Manager for Multiverse Education Group at SSL. Karin: Hi, Mark Lewis, tell me, where did you grow up? Mark: I grew up in Southern California when I was young and in Oregon when I was a teenager. I moved to Oregon when I was […]

Catching Big Air: Q&A With SSL Systems Engineer Dr. Ellen Taylor

Ellen Taylor is a project systems engineer at SSL who has worked on COS, CHIPS, THEMIS, ICON, GLIDE and ESCAPADE missions. Karin Hauck is Communications Manager for the Multiverse education and outreach group at the Space Sciences Lab. Karin: Where did you grow up ? Ellen: I grew up in Boulder, Colorado, since elementary school. I […]

Profile: From Typhoons to ICON—Q&A with Dr. Joanne Wu

Dr. Joanne Wu

Dr. Joanne Wu: I joined SSL in July 2017 as a postdoc, and now I am an assistant research physicist. As part of the ICON science team, my job is to extract information about the upper atmosphere that is embedded in ICON data. I am also in charge of an all-sky camera installed in Antarctica. […]

Profile: Q&A with SSL Aerospace Engineer, Amanda Slagle

What do you do at Space Sciences Laboratory? I design electronic circuit boards—schematics and layouts—and also I write code for parts called FPGAs, or Field-Programmable Gate Arrays. I’ll design a circuit board and decide what parts we use, where they go, and how they connect to each other. Then one of the technicians will put […]

Profile: ICON’s Principal Investigator, Thomas Immel

The ICON (Ionospheric Connection Explorer) mission is now in orbit and sending back valuable data about Earth’s ionosphere, after 28 months of repeated launch delays. Over two years of waiting didn’t seem very long to Principal Investigator Thomas Immel, however, because he had already waited a lifetime for the data ICON is collecting. The inspiration […]