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I’m sorry I introduced myself this morning,
I believe as the project manager of this mission.
That’s west coast jet lag setting in.
I am the principal investigator for the Ionospheric Connection Explorer, which we call ICON.
I like to point out, I didn’t even have time to pull down everyone’s logos,
but we have a number of people working on this project including Peter Harvey and Ellen Taylor,
who were on THEMIS, Stephen Mende, who worked on IMAGE
and several other missions, Chris Englert, a number of great people with hardware experience.
I am also going to work on that one-slide summary, not there yet,
but I do have just a few slides, oh gosh I guess I could have checked this out.
Next slide please.
So I want to give you a scientific summary
because I give you some indication of why we are excited about this mission
and why we really want to do this and we think we got a good way of going about it.
I like to say this is a heliophysics mission studying the equatorial ionosphere of the earth,
mainly the focus because the densest plasma between earth and sun is created
and trapped in the magnetic field of Earth’s equatorial ionosphere.
And as such, it is an excellent natural plasma laboratory for
a number of natural plasma processes, universal processes occur near the equator.
Now one of these is a light.
So if everyone can see that, there have been a number of images from LEO, high-Earth orbit,
and now new platforms, including radio tomographic platforms
that produce images of the earth, be that through a photometer ,
from Dynamics Explorer, which first showed us the indication of the equatorial air glow bands
and these eclipse, this is sort of an iconic image of the Space Age really I think,
which shows the Aura, the earth’s exosphere,
and the equatorial air glow bands that straddle the magnetic equator.
Later missions, including IMAGE, FUV imager.
This is a FUV picture, far ultraviolet.
Another FUV image here from IMAGE shows real interesting structure in these bands
and of course TIMED launched in 2002, gave us a very good close look at these bands
and gave us an indication how variable they were.
Also point out, there’s a number of scientific processes that have been discovered,
or a number of physical processes that surprised everyone
when they were found this decade,
such as the extraction of plasma from the low latitudes
and drawing them over up into the high latitudes into the polar regions over D.C.,
here showing the East Coast of the U.S being inundated high density plasma from low latitudes.
And then this picture here shows what looks like two different color bars,
but these are two different images from conjugate points of the earth 6,000 miles apart.
One in Australia, this is in Darwin and one in Japan,
showing these conjugate waves in the ionosphere coming from no one knows what.
So anyway, after a decade of scientific surprises,
it’s clear without a complete set of observations of all the drivers
and effects in this remarkable region of space
we cannot answer the high priority scientific questions that are now plain.
Next slide please.
And these are average pictures of the ionosphere.
This one is taken from TIMED in July of 2002.
This is January 2003, this is a Mercator plot, magnetic coordinates.
This is just straddling the equator, see this massive change in the ionosphere.
That would have never been predicted by anyone and couldn’t be explained for awhile
when TIMED found it until, at the same time,
scientific models started showing that when you introduce energy into the atmosphere
and in the troposphere in the rain forest, the atmosphere starts beginning to move together
and tides form these large temperature enhancements.
This is 100 kilometer altitudes, so at the edge of space.
You’ve gotten these very large changes in temperatures
and winds and that really looked to be connected.
Next slide please.
And we can simulate that effect.
And if you look from the north to south
and the equator, south to north, it gets bright, dim, bright again and we can simulate,
we can say okay this is sort of the range.
This is sort of the dim portion.
This is a bright ionosphere.
We can simulate that by changing the electric field and the same electric ionospheric model.
There is a number of the drivers you can push in the same model to give you pretty much the same answer.
So the point is we want to separate out these drivers to understand the system response.
Next slide please.
So ICON is designed in part to answer those kinds of questions.
ICON carries a wind imager measuring winds 90 degrees offset.
You can rebuild from separate observations a wind vector at every particular point
where these fields of view eventually cross.
I’ll help understand that in a minute.
So in the Rand direction, there is a field of view that we keep clear for the electric plasma drift instrument,
which gives you electric fields and off to the side we do imaging.
So that is ICON in its 24-degree orbit at 550 kilometers altitude,
comes flying along past point in the ionosphere that you are interested in.
First, it takes a wind measurement at the foot point of these magnetic field lines and also in the ionosphere.
And then later it’s on those fields lines intersecting that position measuring the electric field
on that field line where your measuring the winds.
Also, it takes images in EUV and the FUV to retrieve all the other important parameters
and then three-and-half minutes later, makes the final wind measurement.
So are these are the instruments and the quantities were after to answer these questions.
And I think that is it.