On 2 June 2018 at Vandenberg Air Force Base,California,Orbital ATK personnel finished all-day operations to move and mate the Pegasus XL rocket to the Stargazer L1011 aircraft,a converted airliner,in preparation for the 15 June (14 June EST) launch of NASA's ICON (Ionospheric Connection Explorer) satellite.The ICON mission,led by UC Berkeley,will study the mysterious boundary between the Earth's atmosphere and outer space,the ionosphere.The ionosphere is a complex transitional area of plasma that thickens in the day with high ultraviolet radiation,charged particles from the Sun,and thins out again at nighttime.It can be difficult for spacecraft to navigate because of the variable drag it subjects them to.To date,relatively little is known about this critical region for telecommunications and GPS signals,which can be distorted or even completely disrupted there,and ICON,a mission of NASA Heliophysics,hopes to fill in some of the gaps.
Our increased situational awareness of the region will help protect astronauts and satellites alike,NASA says.*
The Orbital ATK Pegasus XL rocket was being prepared to be ferried by the Stargazer aircraft to NASA's Kwajalein Atoll facility in the remote Republic of the Marshall Islands in the Pacific,with a refueling stop at Hickam AFB,Hawaii.The NASA facility,which includes a tracking station for crewed spaceflight and NASA research,is a tenant of the Ronald Reagan Ballistic Missile Defense Test Site,which is primarily a test facility for US missile defence and space research programmes.The Reagan Test Site,as it is informally known,is managed by the US Army Kwajalein Atoll (USAKA) and assisted by Bechtel Corporation.Besides an impressive array of deep space and other antennae and radars,there are also launch facilities on some of the 11 islands of the Atoll that are leased from the Marshall Islands by the US Army,such as a commercial SpaceX facility on Omelek Island.*
Orbital ATK (OA)
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