The ICON satellite loaded for air launch beneath a Northrup Grumman L-1011 jet. The 600-pound satellite is in the nose of a Pegasus XL rocket. Photo: @NASASun Twitter
A weather instrument with St. Cloud State ties launched Oct. 10 aboard NASA’s ICON satellite.
John Harlander, retired St. Cloud State physicist.
The weather instrument — called MIGHTI — was designed, fabricated and tested by emeritus physics professor John Harlander, in collaboration with his St. Cloud State students and other scientists.
MIGHTI — Michelson Interferometer for Global High-Resolution Thermospheric Imaging — is one of four instruments aboard the Ionospheric Connection Explorer (ICON).
ICON is tasked with studying the little-understood region where planetary weather and space weather meet. The satellite is now orbiting 360 miles above the Earth with solar panels deployed. After a month-long commissioning period, ICON will begin sending back data in November.
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The ionosphere is a layer of upper atmosphere that extends about 50-360 miles above Earth’s surface. It is noted for its high concentration of ions and free electrons and its ability to reflect radio waves.
ICON is a collaboration of federal agencies and American universities, coordinated by NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, which is northeast of Washington D.C.
Harlander is part of a seven-scientist MIGHTI team.
Among the students who worked on MIGHTI are Maria Gaffney ’15 and Alex Griswold ’14. They teamed with Russ Lidberg of St. Cloud State’s Center for Microscopic Imagining and Analysis to test and improve diffraction gratings, the optical elements that split and bend light. The gratings were then fabricated by Bach Research, Boulder, Colorado.
Launch of the ICON was scratched in December 2017 and again in June 2018 and November 2018.
MIGHTI instrument. Photo courtesy of NASA.
The first launches were scheduled for the Reagan Test Site in the Kwajalein Atoll, 2,100 miles southwest of Honolulu, Hawaii.
The mission launched from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, an hour east of Orlando, Florida. The 600-pound ICON was mounted to the forward end of a Pegasus rocket underneath the belly of an L-1011 carrier jet.
Developed by Orbital Sciences Corporation, the Pegasus rocket is now owned by Northrup Grumman.
The MIGHTI instrument is descended from SHIMMER (Spatial Heterodyne Imager for Mesospheric Radicals), an instrument family Harlander helped design.
SHIMMER instruments flew on the Shuttle Atlantis in 2002 and orbited in a U.S. Naval Research Laboratory satellite launched in 2007.
Among the inventions bearing Harlander’s name are U.S. patents for spatial heterodyne spectrometer and method and Doppler asymmetric spatial heterodyne spectroscopy.
Artist’s conception of the ICON satellite in orbit. Image courtesy of NASA.
