The ionosphere stretches from roughly 50 to 360 miles above Earth’s surface. This video was captured from the International Space Station. NASA
"This is the first time that NASA's flown a science mission as a hosted payload on a commercial satellite ..."
Dubbed the GOLD mission - for Global-scale Observations of the Limb and Disk - it is the first NASA science mission to fly an instrument on a commercial communications satellite. This combination of factors makes it hard to predict changes in the ionosphere - and these changes can have a big impact. This video was captured from the International Space Station.
The complexity of these interactions makes it very hard to predict when an atmospheric change in the ionosphere and thermosphere will occur, and this can be a serious problem for satellite communications. (It's headed to an orbit of 22,000 miles, or 35,400 kilometers, above Earth; for comparison, the International Space Station circles at about 250 miles, or 400 km above the surface.) From there, it will be able to track the temperature of almost a whole hemisphere's ionosphere and thermosphere, giving scientists invaluable data to build models of the complicated region near the top of Earth's atmosphere.
One of the goals of the mission is to understand what drives changes in the region.
As for the now missing craft that was holding GOLD among other cargo, a European Ariane 5 rocket, it initially took off without any trouble around 5 pm EST, making it through liftoff and the first stage engine ignition.
"Being on hosted commercial satellites gives us, NASA, a new cost-effective tool in our toolbox for doing science", Talaat said. Spectrographs are scientific instruments that have been created to break light down into its constituent wavelengths and to measure their intensity. Its sensors field the full spectra of light.
The GOLD mission, situated in geostationary orbit over the Western Hemisphere, will take a global scan of the ionosphere and upper atmosphere every half-hour, allowing scientists to get a complete look at the temperature and weather of that region, which they've never had before.
From these images, scientists can determine the temperature and relative amounts of different particles - such as atomic oxygen and molecular nitrogen - present in the neutral atmosphere, which is useful for determining how these neutral gases shape ionospheric conditions.
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"Just like an infrared camera allows you to see how temperatures change with different colors, GOLD images ultraviolet light to provide a map of the Earth that reveals how temperature and atmospheric composition change by location", Eastes said.
Members of the GOLD team pose in a clean room at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado Boulder, after the instrument underwent a pre-ship review before being sent to Airbus Defense and Space in Toulouse, France. LASP built the instrument.
The SES-14 telecommunications satellite, carrying NASA's GOLD mission, and the Al Yah 3 communications satellite launched aboard Arianespace's Ariane 5 rocket from French Guiana Jan. 25, 2018.
For years, scientists have been able to study Earth's upper atmosphere in detail, using ground-based observations as well as low-Earth-orbit missions. Different levels of the ionosphere absorb different levels of radiation, which is what causes the auroras people on Earth's surface sometimes see.
GOLD itself is a satellite of sorts, which will orbit around the Earth at the relatively close height of 22,000 miles in order to get some good photos and data from the ionosphere.
GOLD is the newest addition to NASA's fleet of Heliophysics missions.
The mission will examine the response of the upper atmosphere to force from the sun, the magnetosphere and the lower atmosphere. Previously, it was believed that the upper atmosphere was affected primarily by the sun's radiation, which creates space weather.
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