NASA’S ICON Space Weather Satellite Has Suddenly Gone Silent

A 3-year-old NASA satellite tv for pc misplaced contact with floor controllers two weeks in the past and is now wandering by means of low Earth orbit with out supervision. Sadly, the house company fears the worst.

NASA’s Ionospheric Connection Explorer (ICON) mission has not communicated with floor stations since November 25 as a result of some form of glitch the house company is but to establish, NASA wrote in a weblog submit on Wednesday. The spacecraft is provided with an onboard command loss timer that’s designed to reset ICON within the occasion that contact is misplaced for eight days, however the reset seemingly didn’t work because the group was nonetheless unable to speak with the spacecraft on December 5 after the ability cycle was full.

Although silent, the ICON spacecraft remains to be intact. NASA used the Department of Defense’s Space Surveillance Network to verify that ICON is nonetheless on the market in a single piece, in line with the house company. But communication is clearly key for orbiting spacecraft, because it permits the mission group to ship instructions to satellites and likewise obtain information by means of downlinked alerts.

“The ICON mission team is working to troubleshoot the issue and has narrowed the cause of the communication loss to problems within the avionics or radio-frequency communications subsystems,” NASA wrote within the weblog submit. “The team is currently unable to determine the health of the spacecraft, and the lack of a downlink signal could be indicative of a system failure.” Oof, that doesn’t sound good.

ICON, launched in October 2019, is tasked with observing the way in which terrestrial climate interacts with house climate in Earth’s ionosphere. It does so (or a minimum of it did so) from an orbital outpost that’s roughly 360 miles (580 kilometers) above the planet. The spacecraft carries 4 devices to measure numerous traits of the ionosphere and seize ultra-violet pictures of the higher ambiance. The ICON mission has supplied a complete view of this a part of Earth’s ambiance which would in any other case require two or extra orbiting spacecraft to collect, according to NASA.

The mission was initially alleged to final for 2 years and has been working on an prolonged timeline since December 2021. Hopefully NASA can squeeze extra time beyond regulation from this vital house climate satellite tv for pc.

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