New Weather Satellite Coming!

The University of California at Berkeley has been given a $200 million grant by NASA to build a satellite. This new satellite will be made to determine how Earth’s weather affects extreme “space weather” (the weather at the edge of our atmosphere and the edge of space). Why would that be important? Just about everything we use in our daily lives anymore involves a cell phone, GPS, satellite communication, or radio communications. Well, some space weather can actually disrupt those satellites (GPS, cell phones, etc.) and radio communications.

The new satellite will be called the Ionospheric Connection Explorer (ICON), and UC Berkeley will be responsible for the design, construction, and operations of the project. Since this can’t be done overnight, the launch is not expected to occur until some time in 2017. Once launched, it will be sent to orbit around 345 miles above the Earth’s surface in the ionosphere. Why the ionosphere specifically? There are many layers of the atmosphere, and one of the highest levels is the ionosphere, ranging from around 50 miles to 370 miles in altitude. It can encompass parts of the mesosphere, thermosphere, and even the exosphere, but it is not the same exact thing as those. What makes the ionosphere unique is that it is ionized by the sun radiation to create constantly moving streams of charged particles. The ionosphere is basically a container of electrons and electrically charged molecules surrounding the Earth. Those charged molecules are what can disrupt GPS, cell phone service, radio communications, etc.

But ICON won’t just be studying weather in space, but it will also be trying to see how that weather affects our weather here on Earth too, and vice versa.

“Ten years ago, we had no idea that the ionosphere was affected and structured by storms in the lower atmosphere,” said the project’s principal investigator, Thomas Immel, a senior fellow at the Space Sciences Laboratory. “We proposed ICON in response to this new realization.”

The below image shows a bright red wall of plasma, not to be confused with the aurora lights, which are lower in altitude, where Earth and the ionosphere meet. Despite the fact that it looks computer rendered, this is actually a real picture taken by an astronaut aboard the International Space Station.

UC Berkeley will use ICON to try to make a connection between storms that occur near Earth’s surface and space-weather storms, which may allow for better prediction of space weather events. Not only does this help with our communications satellites, but it also could help with the safety of commercial airliners, which today cannot rely solely on GPS satellites to fly and land because sometimes the satellites can send distorted signals thanks to charged-particle storms in the ionosphere.

“We know that the solar wind plays a big role in the ionosphere, but most of the time the sun is relatively quiet, and our space environment still varies quite a bit,” he said. “We think that variability is coming from weather on our own planet, which can be very powerful.”

Sources: NASA, UC-Berkeley, Stanford