Project Updates

ROPA – Project Updates

Daily Updates

LAUNCH!

February 12, 2007

We launched at 3:45 am local time, with 5 seconds left to spare in the window for the night. Apogee was within 30 km of nominal, and all deployments and maneuvers seemed to work amazingly well. More news when we know more.

February 11, 2007 — A hole in the solar wind

We are anxiously awaiting a promised high-speed stream from a coronal hole on the sun which should hit us sometime today, but it didn’t get here during the window tonight. There was a fairly impressive lack of solar wind. More of a solar wisp than a solar wind. Strong activity promised for tomorrow, so we’ll see.

Here are some pictures of the sledding run the experiment team has been building on the hill between TM and the rocket assembly building.

 

 

 

February 10, 2007 — No winds, no clouds…no aurora

We were mostly good for winds and clouds, but there was barely a kiloRayleigh all night long. We are stuck in the doldrums between two (hopefully) more active regions on the sun.

February 9, 2007 — No winds, now clouds

We had some moderate auroral activity today, including a dramatic come-out-of-nowhere display at Toolik Lake and Kaktovic (just to prove to us that we can’t always predict when good aurora is about to happen), but were socked in for clouds at Poker all night long. We are required to have 60% clear skies at the launch site by FAA rules. Fortunately the severe winds of the past few days (which have been strong enough to blow some of the styrofoam panels off the payload boxes) have died down. The auroral activity is weakening somewhat but is still much more active than last month.

Here are some pictures of the Denali area (about a 3 hour drive from here) taken this past weekend by our power systems engineer, Tom Malaby.

February 8, 2007 — Ditto

Same as yesterday.

February 7, 2007 — Still too windy

Lots of nice aurora again, but still far too windy to launch.

February 6, 2007 — Window reopens

The Poker Flat launch window reopened again last night, with lots of nice aurora but too much wind for launching.

January 25, 2007 — Waiting for next window

Now the moon is up all night, and getting stronger every night; it washes out the aurora so we can’t see it or record it. Thus we need to wait for the next “moon-down” 2 week window, approximately Feb 5-20. Launching in this February window is the last chance for us this winter, as we cannot launch in March or later because sunlight on the payload will blind the onboard cameras; thus the Labelle “CHARM” rocket group has graciously agreed to let us slip into their spot as their mission does not have this March restriction. Hopefully either we or the 4th mission will launch early enough in the February window to allow the Labelle mission to be staged and launched in the remainder of the February window so that nobody has to come back in March. Updates to be continued Feb 5th/6th.

January 24, 2007 — no launch, end of window

Snowing all night and very little activity. We have reached the end of our window so will now have to work out how we can fit in among the other rockets that are now waiting to be launched. I will send another update when this is figured out, it may take a day to get decided.

January 23, 2007 — no launch

Clear skies, but no activity.

January 22, 2007 — …and still here…

Snow all night, and no activity. Signs of cabin fever are starting to break out among the inmates….

January 21, 2007 — We’re still here….

Well, we’re still here. We had nice clear weather at all the downrange sites, and had some nice auroral activity to the north where we want it, but it never showed any indication of changing from structured east-west bands of aurora to the distinctive amorphous blobs of pulsating aurora that we want. On we go…

January 20, 2007 — Marginal

A marginal night all the way around: mediocre weather, neither bad enough to take the day off nor good enough to use; and mediocre solar wind, not slow enough to give up on but nothing to launch into. We are hopeful that a sunspot is about to face us (see http://sohowww.nascom.nasa.gov/data/realtime-images.html) and the high-speed solar wind from the recent coronal hole is still hanging in there, so we’ll see.

-K

January 19, 2007 — Larsen’s JouleII rockets launched!

Tonight our downrange site at Toolick Lake was snowed in, so the other mission (JouleII, PI Miguel Larsen at Clemson) was “prime” for the night. They had good conditions and good activity, and they launched late in the morning, a salvo of 4 vehicles all of which went off beautifully. So now when we drive down the hill, there’s only one rocket left….

Actually in my note the other day I was wrong when I said that ROPA was the one on the far right; ROPA is on the middle launcher, Pad3 out of 5. The solar wind continues to stay at the high velocity of a high-speed stream from a coronal hole, so we continue optimistic for good auroral activity tomorrow.

 

Pictures taken by Linda May

Here is an up-close picture of our BlackBrant12 rocket on the rail, enclosed in its styrofoam box for warm air containment. You can see the fins of the first three stages poking through the box; it’s a little hard to see the scale but my head would come to a little above the bottom fin if I stood next to it. The top motor (the 4th stage, the Nikha) doesn’t have fins because it doesn’t ignite until the vehicle is above the atmostphere, so there’s nothing for fins to push against.

In the background you can see one of the smaller Larsen vehicles.

-K

January 18, 2007 — Almost…

We came very close to launching, dropping the count to T-2 twice tonight, and seeing lots of nice pulsating aurora right overhead in the clearest skies we’ve seen all week. However (there’s always a however, it seems….) the pulsations never moved very far north, and we would have flown out of them before our particle detectors turned on. So we had to recycle the count each time. You can see in the attached figure the timeline of the auroral activity for the night. The Kaktovic magnetometer is on the north shore of Alaska, under apogee. The Fort Yukon is about 1/3 of the way north, and College and Poker are at the range. Every time the auroral currents strengthen into activity, it makes a magnetic deflection that the ground magnetometers can see. We dropped the count at the first big spike at 830 UT, and again at 9UT; at 11UT we switched over to the Larsen rockets but by the time the next big event came around at 1130 UT the skies in the north were too cloudy.

Things feel promising for tomorrow, we’ll see!

We are promised continuing magnetospheric activity and relatively good weather tomorrow night….

-K

January 17, 2007 — Countdown to T-2 minutes and hold, recycle

17, 2007

The picture above shows the 5 rockets on their rails; the picture is taken from the telemetry station up the hill from the launchers and also shows the nice steady auroral oval that we saw as we drove in to the range tonight. The picture below shows the launch pads in more detail; ROPA is the rocket on pad3, to the far right; the other 4 are the four payloads of the Joule2 mission which is sharing our window. The white rectangles you see are the styrofoam boxes which enclose th payloads and motors and are used to contain warm air that keeps them warm; the rockets are launched right through the styrofoam boxes.

Today we had better weather and good auroral activity; in fact we lowered the count from the T-10 minute hold where we sit for most of the night (which means that at any time we are ready to launch in 10 minutes); down to a T-2 minute hold (from which we can launch in two minutes, but we can only sit here for 30 minutes as it involves setting up roadblocks and having instrumentation getting hotter). However, though we had a (really pretty and swirly) auroral breakup and substorm, it never developed into the pulsating aurora that ROPA (“Rocket Observations of Pulsating Aurora”) is designed to study. So we eventually recycled to T-10 and waited for the next event. We had a series of activity but cloudcover generally worsened throughout the night. Towards the very end of the window, we had pulsating aurora overhead Poker, but we can’t use that because the rocket doesn’t go straight up, it goes northward, so we need activity north of Poker.

We did though get the chance to study the pulsations with the AMISR radar, which looks very interesting. The pictures below show some of the data from AMISR from the time of the swirly breakup earlier in the night; you can see the increased electron density in the ionosphere 100-120 km altitude caused by the precipitating aurora, and also the velocity vectors showing perpendicular flow velocities around the arcs. It is an amazing tool and will be a great enhancement to our studies. AMISR plots were provided by Craig Heinselman/SRI.

We are promised continuing magnetospheric activity and relatively good weather tomorrow night….

-K

January 16, 2007 — More snow, and AMISR checks

The snow continues, but the solar wind is back with a vengeance…after we scrubbed early last night, there was a huge event at 4am…probably still to cloudy to launch into but spectacular levels of activity (1200 nT bay at kaktovic for those who have watched these things); so we stayed longer tonight but really there’s an awful lot of snow. We are promised better weather tomorrow. In the meantime though we did get a good interference test out of the way. We are fortunate to be launching over the newly commissioned AMISR radar at Poker Flat (see http://isr.sri.com/iono/amisr/) and tonight we ran an interference test to see whether it would disturb the rocket telemetry. It did show up as a small interference, so they were able to adjust the frequencies to avoid this; this is a good thing as we very much would like AMISR data during the rocket flight.

January 15, 2007 — Snow…

…snowing all day and all night, but the solar wind is back! so we have hopes for tomorrow.

January 14, 2007 — Still waiting…

A quiet night, with a boring rocket (this is a good thing), and boring weather (also a good thing), but also boring aurora (not such a good thing); the solar wind is starting to show some signs of life and there should be some activity starting tomorrow, so hopefully updates will start getting more interesting (hopefully in a good way!)

January 13, 2007 — Vehicles armed and vertical

Today we finally completed (mostly) the arming and practice count procedures, and the launchers have been elevated to near vertical. This has taken longer than typical because of lots of motor arming safety procedures, but we haven’t missed much because the magnetosphere isn’t just quiet, it appears to be comatose…We were supposed to have cloudy skies and active aurora tonight, but we had clear skies and absolutely no aurora at all (I’ve never seen it so quiet in all my years up here), so, so much for predictive capabilities. Still, with some (hopefully minor) concerns and remaining (hopefully minor) arming procedures, we are now vertical and through the practice counts, and basically ready to go; all we need is some aurora!

I meant to take a picture of the rockets on the rails (by “vertical” I mean that the house structures over the rails have been pulled back and the launchers with their payloads have been moved to a vertical position) on the way out tonight (this morning; the window goes to 5am local time) but I forgot. I’ll try to get one tomorrow.

January 12, 2007 — Waiting for Aurora

Well, we are conveniently and efficiently combining poor weather (see attached weather figure), no aurora, and payload problems all in one night….We have worked through and resolved 3 of 4 serious payload problems today, and hope to resolve the 4th by early tomorrow night when we can turn the payloads on again. At the moment, we have stopped testing so that the motor guys can go onto the pad and arm the motors, a careful process that takes about 4 hours. They need to arm the motors both for our 4-stage BlackBrant12 vehicle (4 motors) as well as for the 4 smaller rockets of the parallel Larsen campaign which is also waiting to launch this month. Today has been busy and constructive, but we are all anxious to get to the point where we are ready to launch. Hopefully by tomorrow evening.

January 11, 2007 — ROPA on the rail

January 11, 2007

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The ROPA payload is being hung on the launch rail, and boxed in styrofoam. The launch rail is horizontal here, and enclosed in a movable “house” on rails. The house can be pulled back and then the launcher can be moved vertical. The styrofoam housing will cover most of the payload and warm air will be pumped through it to keep the rocket at room temperature. Various delays have slowed progress but we hope to complete a practice count tonight; the weather is extremely cloudy tonight so we have not missed much.

December 14/16, 2006

 

 

 

 

 

 

Cleary Summit.

 

 

 

 

 

The payload, partially assembled, is left at Poker over the New Year break. The engineer team returns after the New Year to complete the assembly and pre-launch checkouts, and the launch window will open January 10th

December 12, 2006

The two FAD payloads in the assembly building. The ziploc bags are being purged with dry nitrogen to protect the sensors in the particle detectors from the humidity of the room air.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The top of one of the FADS, showing the electron detector and the magnetometer mounted on the front end.

December 11, 2006

Ed White assembles one of the FAD payloads in the assembly building at Poker Flat Research Range, Chatanika, Alaska.

Fall 2006

In Fall 2006 the ROPA project successfully completed integration at Wallops flight facility, and in December, the payload was moved to the Poker Flat research range in Alaska for the launch campaign.

March 2006

In March the ROPA project had a design review. This is a big step as it allows the entire project to move forward significantly. ROPA was successfully reviewed and now the Wallops team will begin building it.