- GOLD and ICON are space missions of NASA.
- Both will be launched in 2018.
- They will team up to explore the ionosphere, located 96 km above Earth’s surface.
- GOLD stands for Global-scale Observations of the Limb and Disk (GOLD)
- ICON stands for Ionospheric Connection Explorer
- The two missions will be complementary to each other.
- ICON will launched in low-Earth orbit (LEO) located at 560 km above Earth, like a close-up camera.
- GOLD will be launched in geostationary orbit over Western Hemisphere, about 35,398 km above earth.
- It will help in full-disk view of ionosphere and upper atmosphere beneath it every half hour.
- The two missions can cooperate with each other when ICON passes through GOLD’s field of view and each mission can get snapshot of same region.
- This overlap in their data will make it easier to identify reasons for changes in upper atmosphere at a given time.
- One of missions’ goals is to measure how upper atmosphere changes in response to hurricanes and geomagnetic storms.
- GOLD will also explore how upper atmosphere reacts to geomagnetic storms, which are temporary disturbances of Earth’s magnetic field caused by solar activity.
- At night, GOLD will examine disruptions in ionosphere, which are mainly dense, unpredictable bubbles of charged gas that appear over equator and tropics, sometimes interfere with radio communications.