NASA's ICON Mission Rescheduled,Launch Moved to Florida

NASA's Ionospheric Connection Explorer satellite,or ICON,has been cleared again for launch following a lengthy delay.It was originally to have been launched from the US Army Kwajalein Island's Ronald Reagan Ballistic Missile Test Facility in June of this year,but was called back when the Northrop Grumman Innovation Systems Pegasus rocket began emitting anomalous data during a ferry flight from Vandenburg AFB to Kwajalein.The bad data was traced to a faulty sensor which was subsequently replaced,NASA said.
The new launch date is 6 October 2018,with a ninety minute launch window that opens at 4:00 AM EDT.The Pegasus rocket will be launched from the NGIS Stargazer 1011 aircraft,a converted Lockheed TriStar L-1011 airliner,one of only three airworthy L-1011s in the world.
Takeoff will be from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station,Florida and launch will occur off the coast of Daytona at altitude 39,000 ft.,with a heading of 105.0 degrees.*
ICON will study how charged and neutral gases behave and interact in the upper atmosphere,where the forces acting in the ionosphere simultaneously include shifts in neutral winds;pressure gradients;and solar activity.ICON will study each of the forces individually so scientists can better elucidate cause-and-effect relationships.*
ICON is an Explorer-class mission with supervision from the NASA Goddard Spaceflight Center in Greenbelt,Maryland.*
Northrop Grumman Corporation (NOC)

Orbital ATK Readies NASA ICON Mission

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)