NASA’s Mission to explore Ionosphere

NASA has announced two missions to explore the little-understood area of 96 km above Earth’s surface. The two missions Global-scale Observations of the Limb and Disk (GOLD) and Ionospheric Connection Explorer(ICON) will team up to explore the ionosphere.

ICON will be in low-Earth orbit, at 560 km above Earth, like a close-up camera while GOLD will be in a geostationary orbit over the Western Hemisphere, about 35,398 km above the planet’s surface. It will help in full-disk view of the ionosphere and the upper atmosphere beneath it every half hour.

Ionosphere

The ionosphere is defined as the layer of the Earth's atmosphere that is ionized by solar and cosmic radiation.
It lies 75-1000 km (46-621 miles) above the Earth, and the thickness of the ionosphere is quite tiny compared with the size of Earth.
Due to high energy from the Sun and from cosmic rays, the atoms in this area are “ionized,” and are therefore positively charged.
These are the layers of near-Earth space and are home to radio signals used to guide airplanes, ships and Global Positioning System satellites.

Source: IE

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