NASA launches satellite to explore where air meets space

NASA launched a satellite on Thursday night to explore the mysterious, dynamic region where air meets space.

The satellite — called Icon, short for Ionospheric Connection Explorer — rocketed into orbit following a two-year delay. It was dropped from a plane flying over the Atlantic off the Florida coast.

Five seconds after the satellite's release, the attached Pegasus rocket ignited, sending Icon on its way.

The ionosphere is the charged part of the upper atmosphere extending several hundred miles (kilometers) up. It's in constant flux as space weather bombards it from above and Earth weather from below, sometimes disrupting radio communications.

"This protected layer, it's the top of our atmosphere. It's our frontier with space," said NASA's heliophysics division director, Nicola Fox.

Fox said there's too much going on in this region to be caused by just the sun. Hurricanes, tornadoes and other extreme weather conditions on Earth are also adding energy, she noted.

The more scientists know, the better spacecraft and astronauts can be protected in orbit through improved forecasting.

The refrigerator-size Icon satellite will study the airglow formed from gases in the ionosphere and also measure the charged environment right around the 360-mile-high (580-kilometer-high) spacecraft.

"It's a remarkable physics laboratory," said principal scientist Thomas Immel of the University of California, Berkeley, which is overseeing the two-year mission. He added: "Icon goes where the action is."

A NASA satellite launched last year, Gold, is also studying the upper atmosphere, but from much higher up. More missions are planned in coming years to study the ionosphere, including from the International Space Station.

Icon should have soared in 2017, but problems with Northrop Grumman's air-launched Pegasus rocket interfered. Despite the long delay, NASA said the $252 million mission did not exceed its price cap. Northrop Grumman also built the satellite.

During a news conference earlier this week, NASA launch director Omar Baez apologized for the delay.

"We wanted to get things right on this rocket," Baez said. "We have no second chances on these type of missions."

He called the launch "an awesome and great one; this one's been a long time in coming."

Baez said in the end, everything went well. "This is about as good as it gets," he said.

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WASHINGTON (AP) — U.S. intelligence officials have determined that Russian President Vladimir Putin likely didn’t order the death of imprisoned opposition leader Alexei Navalny in February, according to an official familiar with the determination.

While U.S. officials believe Putin was ultimately responsible for the death of Navalny, who endured brutal conditions during his confinement, the intelligence community has found “no smoking gun” that Putin was aware of the timing of Navalny's death — which came soon before the Russian president's reelection — or directly ordered it, according to the official.

The official spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive matter.

Soon after Navalny’s death, U.S. President Joe Biden said Putin was ultimately responsible but did not accuse the Russian president of directly ordering it.

At the time, Biden said the U.S. did not know exactly what had happened to Navalny but that “there is no doubt” that his death “was the consequence of something that Putin and his thugs did.”

Navalny, 47, Russia’s best-known opposition politician and Putin’s most persistent foe, died Feb. 16 in a remote penal colony above the Arctic Circle while serving a 19-year sentence on extremism charges that he rejected as politically motivated.

He had been behind bars since January 2021 after returning to Russia from Germany, where he had been recovering from nerve-agent poisoning that he blamed on the Kremlin.

Russian officials have said only that Navalny died of natural causes and have vehemently denied involvement both in the poisoning and in his death.

In March, a month after Navalny’s death, Putin won a landslide reelection for a fifth term, an outcome that was never in doubt.

The Wall Street Journal first reported about the U.S. intelligence determination.

FILE - Russian opposition politician Alexei Navalny gestures while speaking during his interview to the Associated Press in Moscow, Russia on Dec. 18, 2017. U.S. intelligence officials have determined that Russian President Vladimir Putin likely didn't order the death of Navalny, the imprisoned opposition leader, in February of 2024. An official says the U.S. intelligence community has found "no smoking gun" that Putin was aware of the timing of Navalny's death or directly ordered it. (AP Photo/Alexander Zemlianichenko, File)