What does the Mission Operations Center do?

The MOC team prepare for the upcoming launch

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Dr. Manfred Bester, Manager of Mission Operations Center at the Space Sciences Lab of UC Berkeley, explains what he and his team do to prepare for the upcoming ICON launch.

"The most intense part is the immediate time before launch."

How to Build a Research Satellite

ICON Assembly and Testing

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It’s about a year until ICON launches, and all teamsscience, instruments, mission operations and modeling teamsare moving forward with laser focus. There is little time to rest when so much goes into making a NASA satellite ready for launch in June 2017.  Systems need to be tested to ensure they can download and process the data that ICON will be generating nearly continuously, orbit after orbit, in Earth’s upper atmosphere. Current data processing testing is making use of the data that the flight instruments are already producing as they undergo ground testing—it's a great way to see how everything's flowing through the data pipeline.  In fact, the mission and instrument operations teams worked together recently to perform a “day in the life” test with the instruments, where they ran them through a 24 hour long sequence of commands, to simulate what they will do over a full day's worth of orbits.

A Cake to Celebrate a Milestone

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The team working on ICON’s payload had a party over the weekend to commemorate their working together for the past year and their “empty nester” status now that the instrument has gone to Utah (Space Dynamics Lab) for testing and integration. UC Berkeley Electrical Engineer and party host Dorothy Gordon ordered the festive ICON cake from a local bakery. She said, “I had a great time working with the ICON-ICP (instrument control package) team and just wanted to get them all together again before we all drift off.” The send-off after their intensive work together takes place one year before ICON launches, so the cake could also be an “anti-birthday cake” celebrating ICON’s minus-one birthday!

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ICON skin is based on Greytness by Adammer
Background image, courtesy of NASA, is a derivitave of photograph taken by D. Pettit from the ISS, used under Creative Commons license