![]() ![]() It relies primarily on commercial satellite images from one to two years ago. Google Earth, you may recall, is a re-branding of Keyhole, Inc.’s Earthviewer product. The only difference is that World Wind is open source. Zoom in and look for your childhood home, fly past your favorite landmarks, study the coastlines for continental drift - you have all of the same options. NASA’s World Wind project - like Google Earth - is a 3D planetary visualization system that overlays satellite imagery, weather, political, and topological map data. In some respects the search engine behemoth is quite OS-agnostic, but the 3D virtual globe remains limited to Windows desktops only. To understand what drives variability in the ionosphere requires a careful look at a complicated system that is driven by both terrestrial and space weather.ICON will help determine the physics of our space environment and pave the way for mitigating its effects on our technology, communications systems and society.Few of Google’s projects, rumors of projects, and acquisitions have generated as much envy among Linux users as Google Earth. In order to understand this complicated region of near-Earth space, called the ionosphere, NASA has developed the ICON mission. Variations there can result in distortions or even complete disruption of signals. These winds can change on a wide variety of time scales - due to Earth's seasons, the day's heating and cooling, and incoming bursts of radiation from the sun.This region of space and its changes have practical repercussions, given our ever-increasing reliance on technology - this is the area through which radio communications and GPS signals travel. In this region, the tenuous gases are anything but quiet, as a mix of neutral and charged particles travel through in giant winds. Credit: NASA/GSFC/CIL || The Ionospheric Connection Explorer will study the frontier of space: the dynamic zone high in our atmosphere where terrestrial weather from below meets space weather above. ![]() The electric field permeates through the upper atmosphere and pushes plasma (pink) upwards and downwards like a fountain at 370 miles above Earth’s surface.īeauty pass showing ICON observing the ionosphere. ![]() ![]() These winds eventually form an atmospheric tide that propagates up through the atmosphere.Īt 60-95 miles above the ground, winds associated with atmospheric tides (white arrows) move the chunky, charged ions and separate them from the small, negatively charged electrons, forming an electric field (blue line) in the dynamo region, near the bottom of the ionosphere. The heating and cooling pushes wind patterns out and towards regions where clouds are forming. In this region, daily cycles of cloud formation put energy into the atmosphere that, in turn, create a daily cycle of heating and cooling. One source of atmospheric tides is created above rainforest regions around Earth’s equator such as the Amazon rainforest. ![]()
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