By Sarah Frazier
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center
NASA will begin formulation of a new mission to study Earth’s dynamic interface to space: the upper atmosphere. This is a region that is constantly changing, influenced by Earth’s weather percolating up from below and space weather — in the form of solar energy and space plasma — streaming in from above. This new mission will provide the first systematic study of this region in our atmospheric backyard, providing the data needed to assess, and ultimately forecast, the phenomena that course through Earth’s upper atmosphere.
The new mission, called the Geospace Dynamics Constellation, or GDC, answers a call laid out in the most recent solar and space physics decadal survey for a mission to study how Earth’s atmosphere absorbs and responds to energy inputs. GDC is a mission within NASA’s Living With a Star program, focusing on fundamental heliophysics science and applications of that science to protecting human society and technology. On Sept. 8, 2020, GDC successfully completed the Key Decision Point – A review, or KDP-A, moving the project into Phase A, when the team works on concept and technology development that will support the mission. The GDC project management has been directed to NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. The target Launch Readiness Date is late 2027, and GDC mission timeline will be developed during Phase A.
GDC will study Earth’s upper atmosphere, where our planet’s near-space environment overlaps with our atmosphere and space weather effects can manifest — ranging from the scrambling of communications and navigation signals to satellite orbit disruptions and induced currents that can trigger power outages on Earth’s surface.
Using a distributed constellation of spacecraft working together to gather comprehensive observations from multiple vantage points, GDC will explore the fundamental physics of this region of near space, investigating the complex processes that transmit energy and momentum on scales ranging from seasonal to daily to minute by minute. The level of detail and resolution provided by GDC will give us an unprecedented understanding of the space environment surrounding our home planet. Understanding these processes will provide crucial information needed to understand, and ultimately predict, the variable nature of the space environment our satellites, signals, and astronauts must travel through — and give us new insights into the forces that shape our home planet and other worlds.
