APL Space Weather Watchers Ready for Follow-on Iridium Data Buy

摘要

A team at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory that has been using Iridium mobile communications satellites for the past four years to keep tabs on potentially disruptive space weather is close to securing a grant for continued observations by the 66-satellite Iridium Next constellation the McLean, Virginia, company plans to deploy between 2015 and 2017. It will be the second phase of APL's Active Magnetosphere and Planetary Electrodynamics Response Experiment, or Ampere, which started in 2008, about 10 years after Iridium Communications deployed its present constellation of 66 satellites in low Earth orbit. Ampere project scientists use the satellites' magnetometers - non-science-grade instruments Iridium uses to help keep the communications satellites pointed at the right spot - to measure the agitating effects of solar winds on so-called Birkeland electrical currents that flow between the ionosphere and low Earth orbit.