What will be the best outcome of the GOLD mission?
The best outcome for the GOLD mission will be a comprehensive understanding
of the thermosphere and ionosphere
and how it responds to geomagnetic storms, plasma bubbles,
and forcing from below like waves and tides
and that’s what we really hope to get out of this.
What can GOLD bring to the science community?
GOLD is an unprecedented opportunity to look at the full disk of the Americas
that we can look at the temperature and composition of the thermosphere and ionosphere
and this will really help us study things like geomagnetic storms,
plasma bubbles and the waves and tides that propagate from up from below.
Why should we learn about the ionosphere and thermosphere?
The ionosphere and thermosphere are part our near-space environment
and this is the region where communication and navigation signals have to transit
and when they do they can be impacted by different kinds of variability that happens there.
And when there is variability you can get errors
and so the idea is to be able to forecast this variability and mitigate those errors.
What does GOLD do that has never been done before?
What GOLD does that’s never been done before
is take high resolution images of the full disk at a really high time frequency
- every 30 minutes.
So we’re going to be able to see the dramatic changes that happen on daily to hourly scales
and that’s something we’ve never been able to do before.