ICI-3 Sounding Rocket Integration on Track

Hello reader!

It follows one communicates published in english on the day (07/09), in the website of the Andoya Rocket Range (AAR), announcing that the team of the program ICI-3 was wrapped in the last days in the installations of the AAR in the integration of the instruments for this mission that is predicted to be launched from Svalbard (Norway) through the brazilian / american rocket “VS-30/Orion” between October and November of 2011.

Duda Falcão

ICI-3 Sounding Rocket Integration on Track

Tuesday,

September 7th, 2010 at 09:18

Front left: Takumi Abe, Yoshifumi Saito, Toshihiro Irie (ISAS/JAXA)

Back left: Gudmund Hansen (ARR), June Lunde (ARR),

Jonas Ringnes (UiO), Espen Trondsen (UiO), Geir Lindahl (ARR).

Payload left side: Lars Helge Surdal (Payload Manager)

Over the last few days the integration of instruments into the 2011 ICI-3 sounding rocket has been performed by personnel from Andøya Rocket Range, University of Oslo (UiO), Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency/Institute of Space and Astronautical Science (ISAS/JAXA) and Laboratoire de Physique des Plasmas (LPP) from France. ICI-3 is based on the Andøya Rocket Range (ARR) Hotel Payload concept.

The main instruments in the ICI-3 payload are:

- FBP : Fixed Bias Langmuir Probe, ISAS/JAXA

- m-NSLP : multi -Needle&Sphere Langmuir Probe system, UiO

- LEP-ESA : Low Energy Particle spectrometer, ISAS/JAXA

- EFW : Electric Field and Wave Experiment, UiO.

- ADM : AC/DC Magnetometer, LPP

- SRADS: Sounding Rocket Attitude Detection System, UiO

Status pr. Sept. 6th is that the Norwegian and Japanese instruments are integrated and tested ok, while the French contribution will be ready and tested by the end of the week.

Some of the ICI-3 objectives are to obtain a better physical description of instabilities and wave phenomena driven by the newly discovered Reversed Flow Events (RFEs) in the winter cusp ionosphere. One more objective is to test whether the RFEs are associated with a tangential discontinuity (frozen into plasma) or a rotational discontinuity (indicative of reconnection).

What makes the ICI-work relevant for GPS navigation:

Turbulence and irregularities in the ionosphere give rise to scintillations in the satellite to ground signal. The Total Electron Content (TEC) along the path of a GPS signal can introduce a positioning error ( up to 100 m). This introduces a potential risk when the future traffic in the polar areas demands an increasing accuracy in the satellite navigation signals. Hence, turbulence and irregularities in the ionosphere might be the most important space weather phenomenon for Norway.

Source: Website of the Andoya Rocket Range (AAR)

Comentário: Pois é leitor, essa é mais uma das missões européias que contará com a participação brasileira em 2011. Nessa missão será usado o foguete brasileiro/americano “VS-30/Orion” que é composto em seu primeiro estágio pelo propulsor sólido brasileiro “S-30” e em seu segundo estágio pelo propulsor sólido americano “Improved Orion”. Essa missão que é uma parceria entre o AAR norueguesa, a JAXA japonesa e outras instituições da França e da Noruega, está prevista para ser lançado do sítio de lançamento de Svalbard que faz parte do complexo do Andoya Rocket Range na Noruega por volta de novembro de 2011.