25 March 2009
Here is a final update with the only photo of the launch that was taken.
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Photo by Robert Michell |
20 March 2009
Successful LAUNCH! Here is an initial (brief) update from the PI:
LAUNCH launched! much happiness more later -k
19 March 2009
Today is the unveiling of the great art project that Steve and his team of volunteers have been working on. The photo updates for tomorrow should be spectacular. Here is an update from the PI:
Cascades2 report for Wed evening, Mar 18/19. We continue to have good weather (both skies and winds), and seem to be moving into a period of increasing activity as promised by last month's solar activity. We had enough activity tonight to lower the count to T-2 twice, and almost a third time, but perhaps we are a bit trigger-happy, making sure we don't miss any possible event. At any rate, nothing useable developed tonight but both predictions and Stereo promise us more aurora for the next two days. We are also in for official donuts, and we are within the window of official TM predictions (Ross= 19Mar, Diehl = 22Mar), plus we have the official unveiling of the great TM building artistic project tomorrow, so with so much officialness floating around, we should be good to go tomorrow or at worst the next day. We'll see....
18 March 2009
Another day of counting with not much new to report, as far as updates go. Here is an update from the PI:
Cascades2 report for Tue evening, Mar 17/18. Not tonight. Good for winds, ok for skies, no aurora worth chasing. Based on last solar rotation's activity pattern (27 days ago), this should be the last of a set of 4 rather low-activity nights, so we can be hopeful for an increase in the activity (can it get any lower?...perhaps we shouldn't ask) over the next day or two.
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The aurora we could see far to the north last night. |
17 March 2009
Happy St. Paddy’s Day! Here’s to hoping for a green launch! Here is an update from the PI:
Cascades2 report for Mon evening, Mar 16/17. In for winds (mostly) and nice clear skies at all three sites, but minimal aurora, nothing even worth getting nervous about let alone dropping the count. Stereo promises more activity tomorrow night, so here's hoping. Skies are clear and winds are gusty but seem workable. Up on the science/TM hill, the ground winds continue to be ... interesting would be a word. The TM van rocks and the science building howls...walking across the parking lot is a challenge. But the balloons are happy so as long as we can remove the shelter and go vertical, we seem to be ok, which is different from (but better than) last month...more like Andoya last year. And we managed to launch then, and here we don't even have to worry about fishing boats.
16 March 2009
Last night was the first night of the second window. Everything seems to be in working order, including the team, after a week of rejuvenation. Here is an update from the PI:
Cascades2 report for Sun evening, Mar 15/16. A good night, though no launch yet. Everything is set up again and working well after our 10-day hiatus; the payload is out of the shelter and vertical, and we completed vertical checks and even dropped the count at one point to T-2min, though we recycled soon after. The weather pattern appears to have shifted from last month, so that is good; a nice fat high pressure system over central Alaska should give us a few day run of clear weather. The winds were astonishingly gusty up on the science/TM hill, but we were actually in for winds...it's a mystery. Auroral activity is middling to low; not dead but not too active; the right combination could well give us a launchable event. Tonight's activity was fairly minimal but we are so anxious to catch any possible event that we had to watch it fairly carefully in case anything developed (which it didn't). We'll hope for some more definitive aurora tomorrow. -K
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Here is Kristina in the glass house in downtown Fairbanks. |
The Outhouse Races, including the rocket-like outhouse that won the prize for Prettiest Outhouse, chosen by Meghan, official judge of prettiness at Chatanika Days ’09. |
4 March 2009
Here is Kristina’s update from yesterday:
Cascades2 report for Mon evening, Mar 2/3.
Still no go, completely out for winds all night ("the
worst winds we have seen all year"). These are said
to be unusual, uncommon weather patterns but they're starting
to look very familiar to us....
Well, we have one more night left. We'll see how it
goes. If we have to come back, we'll reconvene on
Sunday March 15th.
Tonight we saw a considerable increase in auroral activity
compared to last night; the solar wind has had a sudden
jump, so hopefully the increased activity will continue
into the next night (and the winds will stop!) Our downrange
sites have been clear, though Kaktovik is having troubles
with moonlight. Both the Toolik site and PFISR gathered
considerable data tonight which will be of interest to the
THEMIS conjunction which occurred this evening.
The science team noted a repeating pattern to the auroral
activity, which we saw last night as well, though at
higher latitudes. We are considering whether these
"poleward boundary intensifications" may be an equally
interesting Alfvenic-type aurora as would be the typical
substorm breakup that we usually use for nightside rocket
launches. We will consider this today, in case the
pattern repeats again tonight for a third time.
Here is the most recent update from the PI:
Cascades2 report for Tues evening, Mar 3/4. No luck, hard out for winds. The correlation between high winds and beautiful substorm breakups continues, a wonderful textbook event this evening. We're out of time this window. We reconvene on Sunday the 15th. We'll hope that the weather improves (it generally is better in March) and that the increased geophysical activity we have seen this month (over previous months) continues its upward trend. My heartfelt thanks to all. We'll get there, and it will be beautiful. -K
2 March 2009
Just two nights left. Last night was better than the past few, but the solar wind is still being difficult. Click here for an update from the PI.
1 March 2009
The solar wind refuses to cooperate with us, even though there are just three more nights left in this window. Here is an update from the PI:
Cascades2 report for Sat evening, Feb 28/1. No luck. In for winds, clear at Kaktovic, no aurora to speak of. We were ready and waiting for anything the solar wind might send us, but nothing doing. We have 3 more nights to count in this window before the moonlight chases us out for a week and a half. We hope for more activity tomorrow or the next day. Goodnight, Darla...
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The rocket and sign at the front gate of PFRR. I keep hoping this will be the last day I see this. |
28 February 2009
Sorry the website temporarily got a little messed up. I am re-doing this update but I don’t even remember what happened this night. Probably we were out for winds. Here is an update from the PI:
Cascades2 report for Fri evening, Feb 27/28. In for winds, but no solar wind...much discussion of the possible correlation between the solar wind and tropospheric winds...they surely seem highly correlated! We are told by those who should know that the amount of Poynting flux that would be needed for the solar wind to start shoving the atmosphere around would be "disturbingly a lot". But we certainly do seem to get a lot of activity when we're out for winds, and nothing much at all when we're not...we call this the Petter Dragoy effect, for the Andoya Rocket Range windweighter. At any rate, no launch tonight. We'll see what the solar wind (and the weather) brings us tomorrow. Kaktovic was clear tonight, and Toolik was in a blizzard (with their windows blowing out again), the opposite of last night. They used "a couple of kilos" of tape to hold it shut. This is one of the reasons we've chosen Toolik as an alternate ground site to Kaktovic, they often have opposite weather patterns so that if one is down, the other is good. Early in the evening, almost before the window opened, we saw a westward surge from Canada that brought some activity over Kaktovic; and towards the middle of the evening there was a "very wimpy" (the official term) substorm over and north of Kaktovic, but neither event was anywhere close to the scale of event that we can use. The solar wind stayed stubbornly northward all night long, and faded to boot, with densities below 1/cc much of the night and the speed dropping from a respectable 700 km/sec at the beginning of the window to barely 500 km/sec by the end. We'll hope for some improvement tomorrow, but Stereo doesn't hold out much hope until the next day. But we've found that we're often a day ahead of the Stereo prediction, so we'll wait and see. After this window, the entire range team will be able to teach a course in space weather prediction... We're all grateful to the continued good cheer of the balloon-launching and tracking team; they're having fun launching one windweighting balloon after another, and the 3-2-1-RElease on the intercom is a cheerful background music to our waiting. And Bob remembered to pull his attenuator during BERTs tonight! They're getting a lot of practice....
Kristina and Meghan at the Ice Sculpture World Championship. |
27 February 2009
We had some really amazing aurora last night, but of course, we were out for winds the whole night. Here is an update from the PI:
Cascades2 report for Thurs evening, Feb 26/27. Nope, still here...just lots of good aurora to watch, so the report is late. Out for winds again unfortunately, as we had some beautiful events and lovely aurora. In the first event of the evening, we confirmed that we can call these launches with minimal visibility from Poker, using the PFISR data, so that was good to learn. Later in the evening we had several excellent events that were recorded by the Toolik team. The Toolik and PFISR data sets will be quite valuable from tonight especially since they are coincident with a quite good conjunction of the 5 Themis spacecraft. Predictions are for improved weather conditions starting tomorrow, so if the solar wind activity holds out, we should be good to go. Here's hoping. -K
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Erik and Meghan with aurora coming out of their heads? |
26 February 2009
Sorry for the delay in getting the updates posted. I had some troubles logging in to the site, but things seem to be fixed today. Here is an update from the PI:
Cascades2 report for Wed evening, Feb 25/26. A quiet night, with almost no ionosphere overhead and very little aurora to the north. Downrange sites still clouded out, though Toolik had potential and could see some weak arcs. Tomorrow, Stereo promises some more solar wind activity, and there is hope that the northern sites could clear by midnight. Tomorrow is also another Themis conjunction, actually a really good one. So here's hoping... -K
25 February 2009
It was a very cloudy night, so even though our magnetometers were showing signs of activity, all three sites were completely blind. This did help us to see how PFISR is showing us the signatures we are looking for as well. Here is an update from the PI:
Cascades2 report for Tues evening, Feb 24/25. We were (mostly) in for winds tonight, but all of our optical sites were blind. The observers at Toolik found 11 different words for snow, to vary their hourly reports a bit... We had a very fine substorm right at the optimal textbook time (9:30-11UT, just in the 90 minutes before magnetic midnight). It was strong enough to show light (but no structure) through the snow at all 3 sites. It is interesting to learn that we are able to see the development of these substorms using PFISR. There are clear and repeatable observations of flow patterns that call out the loading sequence (southward expansion, westward flows) of a developing substorm. I'll ask Mike and Meghan to post an example of this tomorrow, perhaps from one of the nights we were out from winds but had good optics. It is possible that if learn to gauge this a little better and more quantifiably, the PFISR could stand in for the optics. Certainly not for the detailed structural picture the optics give, but probably as an excellent tool for "calling" the developing substorm.
This plot is showing the perpendicular velocity in the eastward direction. The red is a negative velocity (so westward direction) and the blue is positive. So you can see that at about 7:30 we started seeing strong westward flows, which pulled south with time. Then right at about 8:15 you see the breakup phase, where the flows spread back to the north. If you click on the plot you can see more vector velocity plots. Then, if you look at the MSP from Poker you can similarly see the aurora brighten and move south between 7 and 8, and then hit the breakup phase right around 8:15. |
24 February 2009
Last night we were in for winds for most of the night, but were continually teased by ACE, which refused to give us a proper substorm. Here is an update from the PI:
Cascades2 report for Mon evening, Feb 23/24. No launch yet but we did drop the count to the two-minute hold point (twice). We're finally in for winds, hopefully this will hold. We had some nice auroral structures far to the north which looked as if they were setting things up for a good substorm, but never quite did. There was a very fine substorm (600nT bay) over Ft Churchill early in the evening, and that seemed to be the major action in the magnetosphere this evening. But that was too early/too east (by 5 or 6 hours) for us in Alaska. A good dose of Bz-south for an hour or so (vs Bz-north, which is effectively random) would have pushed this evening over the edge into more activity, so this was rather a freebie from the solar-wind gods...there wasn't supposed to be much activity at all tonight. So much for predictions...we'll hope that the predictions for tomorrow are even more wrong! Also, Kaktovic and Toolik were both mostly heavily overcast most of the evening; Kaktovic had some occasional thinning of the clouds but was not really optimal. And still no internet connection at Kaktovic; many thanks to Hans who patiently stayed on the phone for ~many~ hours relaying to us the action (or lack thereof) up there tonight.
Before you can be a PI you must prove you can talk on at least two phones at one time. |
23 February 2009
We are getting quite anxious for a launch, but the winds continue to frustrate us, which is apparent from the brevity of this update from the PI:
Cascades2 report for Sun evening, Feb 22/23. Still here. Out for winds, for the third full day in a row... -K
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Team Toolik stays in good spirits, despite being out for winds three days in a row. |
Nice CASCADES2 hats! |
22 February 2009
Last night was another great night for aurora overhead, but we are still out for winds. Here is an update from the PI:
Cascades2 report for Sat evening, Feb 21/22. Well, I really thought we'd go tonight but we didn't. The weather cleared and the aurora picked up, but we are cursed with high winds at mid-altitudes which mean that we are not within safety limits for launching the motors. So we were out for winds the entire night, just like last night. We did see some very sweet aurora, and the science team practiced calling the launch -- when to drop the count, when to hold, when to decide to go. It's a little tricky to catch a 20-minute event when it takes your rocket 10 minutes to get there...We missed the first event of the night because we were too busy watching it until the Kaktovic team called to say we should have launched! (but we were out for winds anyway). So we were watching the diagnostics more carefully the second time, and decided that we would have caught the event that started at 10UT. Sunday night is special because the pre-midnight period offers a conjunction with ~both~ the US Themis satellites (5 spacecraft in the magnetospheric tail), ~and~ the European ClusterII spacecraft (an array of 4 spacecraft studying boundaries in the magnetosphere). So if we have some good aurora -- and if we are in for winds!!! -- we will hope to go Sunday night. -K
Aurora over Poker Flat last night. Photo by Mike Nicolls. |
A second photo by Mike. |
21 February 2009
We have been having some interesting science conditions and also very good aurora considering we are in solar minimum, but so far conditions have not been right for launch. Here is an update from the PI:
Cascades2 report for Fri evening, Feb 20/21. Only a short report because it's pretty late (early?)...no launch tonight but closer than we've come so far. The winds never quite cleared out, and the solar wind never quite came in... but both considerably improved over previous nights. This was the first night so far where we had a real possibility of going. We did get a (fairly wimply little) substorm at the end of the evening; it gave us some pretty aurora but didn't really turn into the sort of active aurora we want. Better luck tomorrow. Hanna took some nice pictures of the aurora from Toolik, Meghan will post. The Finnish name for northern lights is revontulet, fox fires. -K
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Here is a photo of the aurora that Hanna took last night. |
A second photo of aurora over Toolik. |
20 February 2009
Still no launch, but the future is looking bright! Here is an update from the PI. Also, we have some photos from our field stations for your enjoyment.
Cascades2 report for Thurs evening, Feb 19/20. No launch tonight, but hope for tomorrow and into the weekend. Beginning late tomorrow (Friday) night we should move into a period of increasing activity. We can already see the start of this by looking at the STEREO satellite, which has monitors of the solar wind activity similar to ACE, but is out in front and gets a 1-3 day preview of what is headed towards ACE. You can see this comparison at http://ccmc.gsfc.nasa.gov/ccmc-swan/timelines/ACE_STB.gif (this is the "ACE and STEREO data" link on our spaceweather page) What you see here is in red from STEREO and in black from ACE. The top panel is solar wind density and the second is (upside down) solar wind speed. The two traces are delayed with respect to each other so that the red one tells us what should be coming down the line in another day or two; you can see that the period of decaying solar wind speed and minimal magnetic field strength we have been in since the 16th should break by about 2300UT on the 21st. That would be about 11am local on the 22nd. So it may not get here in time for our window Friday evening, but if it's just a few hours early, it might....it'll be a race between the local meteorological weather (which could break by late Friday evening) and the space weather. We usually see a burst of auroral activity at the beginning of these periods of increased solar wind speed (this is what we saw last weekend), so we are on alert for early this weekend. Another nice thing about this weekend is that there are several possible conjunctions with the US THEMIS satellites and the European Cluster spacecraft.... So hopefully our cruddy weather and inactive space weather are both about to break. I'll ask Meghan to post some pictures of our patient camera crews in the field sites... they are really at the end of nowhere and are patiently awaiting the return of some good aurora to see. Today the weather at Kaktovic was so bad that the crew did not even attempt to reach the observatory; yesterday at Toolik they had to board up the windows. So we are very grateful for their willingness to be out there for us. -K PS: the New Hampshire contender in the Yukon Quest (Mike Ellis from Rumney) has moved up to 9th place (out of 25 remaining...)
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The field station at Toolik Lake. |
The field station at Kaktovik. Very luxurious… |
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Aligning the cameras in Toolik Lake to point toward Kaktovic is a little tricky with limited resources, but it is no challenge for Hanna and Tobbe. |
Hans at work in the spacious Kaktovic field station. |
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Somehow they managed to get a helicopter ride! |
Allison doesn’t have helicopters around (or much of anything really), so she creates her own fun. |
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High wind gusts were blowing out windows at Toolik. Here is the solution. |
19 February 2009
No new pictures for today, as nothing terribly exciting was going on last night. Kristina has a pretty informative update today with a lot of good links.
18 February 2009
Last night the Lehmacher mission launched, so there was a lot of excitement at the range. Here is an update from the PI:
Cascades2 report for Tues evening, Feb 17/18. The Lehmacher team was prime tonight because of clearing skies and no geomagnetic activity. And, they launched! all four rockets with beautiful TMA trails on each one. Hanna at Toolik got excellent images of the TMA trails, which could be seen from Toolik to Fort Yukon. So, now we have the range to ourselves and continue to wait for aurora.
The first Lehmacher rocket with the LIDAR beam and the aurora. Photo by Craig Heinselman |
The TMA trail, photographed by Craig Heinselman. |
Image of the TMA from Toolik Lake with Hanna’s Guppy Cameras. |
A second image from Toolik. |
17 February 2009
We have finally gotten permission to be able to launch, just when the aurora has disappeared. There are clear skies tonight though, so we are all hopeful that the other rocket team will have a launch tonight. Here is an update from the PI:
Cascades2 report for Sunday evening, Feb 15/16. First, our big news this evening is that we have finally received permission to launch from NASA after two weeks of intensive review of the ACS failure on last month's Bounds mission, so this is very sweet. We're very grateful to the NSROC and NASA people who worked long hours over the last 10 days to bring this assessment to closure. So now we can settle into the business of waiting for the aurora to come in and the clouds to go away... Tonight for the first time we have left the rocket vertical on the pad; it will stay this way until we launch. Meghan will post some pictures of the rocket on the rail on the web page, it is boxed in styrofoam for heating purposes. It is very tall... The solar wind activity that has given us aurora for the last two nights has died down, and based on last month's activity and also on looking at STEREO data, we are probably looking at a few days of extremely quiet conditions. Because of this and because of the local meteorological weather (snow tomorrow) we will stand down Monday evening; this will mean that we can after that go for 13 days to the end of the window without having to take another day off. The payload systems all continue to be very well-behaved, and we have also completed our PFISR interference testing. Now we just need some aurora...
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Meghan in front of the Poker Flat Incoherent Scatter Radar. |
Sunset as seen from TM, a good sign of clearing skies! |
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Darla and her weather balloons used to check winds. |
The rocket on the rail. Ours is the big one. Lehmacher is the little baby rocket to the left. |
15 February 2009
We have been seeing good aurora and are getting excited about a launch! Here is an update from the PI:
We have the payload and rocket on the rail and vertical…we
are doing vertical checks as of 11:30pm. There are still
a few hurdles before we can have a true “hot-count”, but we
are hopeful for tomorrow. We ~almost~ have permission to
proceed to a launch, we have been held up for a while
waiting on a assessment of the repercussions of a subsytem
failure on a launch last month, deciding whether this is something
that might affect our flight. We are hopeful to have
a clearance on this by Sunday. Also, there are a few
more mechanical issues with the payload to be dealt
with tomorrow. But getting to vertical checks, and
seeing the telemetry from the rail, is a huge step forward.
We also ran through a practice with the camera field
sites, going through the exercise of pointing the tracked
cameras to follow the footpoint of the rocket.
There has been some relatively good aurora tonight and
last night, caused by a little burp in the solar wind
yesterday. Last night we were able to see some pretty
displays overhead here at Poker; tonight we are clouded
in but the field site at Toolik Lake is showing good
aurora.
Photo by Craig Heinselman |
12 February 2009
The rocket is nearly ready to be launched. After the final build up stages are completed our launch window will officially start. Then we will look for good space weather conditions for launch. For information on the types of conditions we are looking for check out the links at our space weather page. Also, click the photos below for a larger version.
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The first two stages of the rocket motors on the launch rail. |
Erik in front of the Cornell subpayloads which will measure perpendicular electric fields at two points along the magnetic field line near apogee. |
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The front end of the main payload with particle detectors at the top and the PFFs stowed underneath. |
Here the nosecone, attached to the forward subpayload, is being lifted and mated with the main payload. |
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The entire payload is lifted to be mated with the aft subpayload. |
Lowering the rocket in order to be placed on the tractor for transport to the rail. |
The payload is all wrapped up in blankets to keep it warm when it gets rolled outside in the -18F weather. |
5 February 2009
The team has been very busy with rocket- and other kinds of testing.
An ice sculpture on the UAF campus |
A dome and the Alaska sun at noon, as viewed from the science center roof |
Wayne and Dave working on the payload. Dave was working on the PFF’s, and you can see one of the subpayloads on the right side of the photo. |
Hanna, Meghan, Erik, and Steve doing some gravity gradient testing with toroidal sensors (a.k.a. sledding) on the range |
Field Campaign: 20 January 2009
Our field campaign begins this week. Equipment and personnel are beginning to arrive at Poker Flat. We begin to watch the patterns of auroral activity as we approach our window opening on February 11.
Postvibe Testing: December 2008
All detectors were tested in vacuum with a particle source after integration and vibration testing were completed. All detectors behaved properly and were put in storage in preparation for shipment to the field.
Integration: October – December 2008
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