NASA has announced that it would launch two missions to explore a little-understood area 96 km above Earth\u2019s surface.The Global-scale Observations of the Limb and Disk (GOLD) mission will be launched aboard a commercial communications satellite in January 2018, and the designed spacecraft Ionospheric Connection Explorer (ICON) will be launched later this year, the US space agency said on Thursday.<\/p>\n
GOLD and ICON will team up to explore the ionosphere, a boundary area between Earth and the space where particles have been cooked into a sea of electrically-charged electrons and ions by the Sun\u2019s radiation, reports Xinhua news agency.<\/p>\n
These layers of near-Earth space are increasingly becoming a part of human domain as it is home to radio signals used to guide airplanes, ships and Global Positioning System satellites.<\/p>\n
NASA said the two missions were complementary. ICON in low-Earth orbit, at 560 km above Earth, flies through and just above the ionosphere, like a close-up camera.<\/p>\n
GOLD runs in geostationary orbit over the Western Hemisphere, about 35,398 km above the planet\u2019s surface. It will build up a full-disk view of the ionosphere and the upper atmosphere beneath it every half hour.<\/p>\n
The two missions can cooperate with each other when ICON passes through GOLD\u2019s field of view and each mission can get a snapshot of the same region. This overlap in their data makes it easier to identify what caused a certain change to the upper atmosphere at a given time, NASA said.<\/p>\n
One of the missions\u2019 goals is to measure how upper atmosphere changes in response to hurricanes and geomagnetic storms.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe used to think only solar wind could affect the ionosphere, and only the lower atmosphere was affected by terrestrial weather,\u201d said Doug Rowland, ICON mission scientist at NASA.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut now we\u2019re going to get to see how that energy couples together.\u201d<\/p>\n
The solar wind is the Sun\u2019s constant outflow of charged particles and magnetized material.<\/p>\n
GOLD will also explore how the upper atmosphere reacts to geomagnetic storms, which are temporary disturbances of Earth\u2019s magnetic field set off by solar activity.<\/p>\n
During night-time, GOLD will examine disruptions in the ionosphere, which are dense, unpredictable bubbles of charged gas that appear over the equator and tropics, sometimes interfering with radio communications.<\/p>\n
IANS<\/p>\n
Picture courtesy: Alamy<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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