December 30, 2003-January 22, 2004
Sersio was launched this morning at 0857UT. There was a beautiful event, nearly nominal trajectory (9km high, 12 deg west of nominal) There were some payload acs problems but data from all detectors. more later!
-k
Another day with good science and bad weather. Out for winds again for the entire window. Very conflicting reports as to the weather tomorrow morning; the weather here is tricky to predict, and there are very few monitoring stations so there is not really enough data to work with. Predictions for tomorrow’s window vary from (a) better than today to (b) gale force winds and heavy snow. So I guess we just wait and see.
Some more good pictures at http://www.rocketrange.no/campaigns/completed/sersio_2004/040119/status.html, including the rocket on the elevated rail, and some of the (many!) weather balloons that have been launched recently.
-K
Well, we’ve gotten rid of another permutation– no science, and bad weather. So that just leaves the fourth one: good science, AND good weather, for tomorrow morning, right?
We were “out for winds” for the entire window today. At one point it was too windy even to launch a weather balloon to see how bad the winds were. The winds around the launcher peaked about 17 m/s (about 35 mph). But now this evening the front has passed, it is colder, and the stars are out. Well, they were out at dinner time but now apparently it is snowing again. Oh well. But, the meteorologist promises us good weather in the morning.
Steve has been here too long, he is running out of things to take pictures of…here we have the cafeteria. Anonymous full-color and written-in- English “directions-for-dummies” (complete with step-by-step color photos!) have appeared in the laundry room, which has tricky Norwegian appliances. And, the engineers are starting to write poetry during the window…see below.
-K
Sersio Haiku
Trapped flux, solar wind;
Millions of miles from day star
snow swirls outside pad
Wind falls, skies clear, yet –
flux twisting, escapes again
dragon naps, ready
When electrons rain down
and ions rush away, then
dragon will fly, catching them
–Kevin Rhoads
Another non-launch day….we actually had a fairly fantastic ion outflow event–the EISCAT radar scientists said that they had only ever seen one other such event, four years ago in July–but we were out for winds: the winds above the launch rail were too strong and would have blown the booster rocket stage back across Ny Alesund. So, we have had good weather and no science, and now we have had lousy weather and great science, so there are only two permutations left, right?
We’ll see what happens tomorrow, but we may have poor weather for a little while yet. We had fairly fierce winds this afternoon (15 m/s, or 30 mph) and horizontal snow. I don’t think any of the snow ever lands, it just blows sideways across the island.
I’ve attached an image of the flow fields during our fish-that-got-away event this morning.
-K
Well, another day of no wind…no surface or high altitude atmospheric winds, so that’s good for keeping the rocket batteries warm and keeping the trajectory nominal, but no solar wind either, so that’s not so good for auroral activity. The solar wind remains stubbornly pointed northward (you can see this on the ACE data) so we have very little energy coming into the near-Earth space region, and therefore very quiet auroral activity levels.
We are moving into a period of not-so-good (atmospheric) weather; it’s beginning to snow. This makes it difficult to launch the rocket for several reasons: the clouds and snow make the auroral cameras blind, so we can’t see what’s going on, and, the (atmospheric) winds pull heat quickly out of the payload and motors and batteries if we elevate the launch rail up out of the shelter. It takes us about half an hour to go from horizontal in the shelter, to ready-to-launch, so if we need to stay protected in the shelter because of winds, it means we can’t jump easily at a quickly appearing event. We’ll see how these conflicting requirements play out over the next few days. Hopefully we’ll have stronger (solar) wind coupling and stronger activity levels; this makes the events we are looking for bigger, and easier to catch with a rocket.
I’ve attached a snapshot of the convection patterns of the ionosphere over the polar cap. These flow patterns (horizontal motions of ions and electrons at a few hundred km altitude in the lower ionosphere) are what are measured by some of the radars. The two big D-shaped “lobes” of convection are caused by the solar wind pulling back on the Earth’s magnetic field lines across the polar cap. High latitude regions thus flow “antisunward” from noon to midnight, and then a return convection flow pattern sets up which has lower latitude areas flowing sunward. You can see Svalbard as the small triangular island east of Greenland; what we want is for the split between the two convection lobes to be near Svalbard (this is where the ion outflow events occur) and to have strong flows here as well (with strong flows, the contour lines intensify and steepen up, like a steep hill on a topo sheet map.) This event shown in the figure is pretty wimpy looking, because we’ve had such lousy coupling to the solar wind (Bz-north as per ACE.) These patterns, plus the ACE data, set up the general conditions for a good event.
We’ll hope for lots of solar wind and not much atmospheric winds (or snow!!…) tomorrow morning.
-K
We had our first real count today, but we didn’t launch. Things went relatively smoothly as we worked out a few communications issues and discovered a broken pump. We also learned more about how quickly/slowly the rocket will cool down in the chill night air if we leave it vertical on the elevated rail for too long. Weather predictions are still very good for tomorrow, though it seems it may start to get cloudy on Monday. It is clear as a bell right now. Science-wise, we had a few small events, but nothing that lasted long enough, was big enough to hit, or was in the right place. I’ve attached a picture of the radar data that we are using to learn about the ion upflows we are trying to catch. In the panel marked “ion drift velocity” you can see lots of bright pink (ions moving away from the radar, or upward) above altitudes of 400m. However, the total electron density (the first panel) is fairly low, and in general the activity level was quite low for most of the morning. We brought the count down to T-4 minutes, but the arc that hung over the radars at Longyearbyen never quite made it over the expected rocket trajectory, so we’ll try again tomorrow. -K
eiscatsumm17jan Click for full-sized .pdf file
Hi!
This will be just a short report, as we are stopping early today in order to be able to report for station time at 0200UT (3am). We had a practice science run this morning, and a practice count for the rocket later in the day. Overall things went smoothly, though we had some difficulties getting GPS transmissions through the styrofoam “house”; they have had to cut holes through it to compensate it. This required lowering and elevating the launch rail several times, but all seems to be well now.
The excitement for the day was the discovery of recent (lunchtime) polar bear tracks across the driveway to the launcher building. One of the motor crew measured the footprints to be about 12″ across….they look fake but I am assured they are real.
Tomorrow morning (late tonight?) we start our first real countdown. There are 3 hours of preparatory checks, and then the window opens at 0500UT. The science team will be watching various monitors from satellites and ground-based monitors, particularly the EISCAT radars. The first requirement, however, is that the solar wind be able to pump energy into the near-Earth environment, and it can only do this in an efficient way if “Bz is south”, that is, the magnetic field embedded in the solar wind local to the Earth is pointed southward. You can monitor this real-time by looking at data from the ACE satellite:
http://sel.noaa.gov/ace/MAG_SWEPAM_6h.html If the red line (Bz) is below zero for several hours (or preferably many hours) then lots of energy is getting pumped in and the overall activity level of aurora, etc, goes up. Given lots of activity in general, and some 6300 aurora (soft, or red, aurora), then we can start looking in specific for the events we want. You can see a picture of one of the polar bear footprints, and of the rocket on the elevated launch rail, at:
http://www.rocketrange.no/campaigns/completed/sersio_2004/040116/status.html
http://www.rocketrange.no/campaigns/completed/sersio_2004/040116/DSCF0005_resize.JPG
http://www.rocketrange.no/campaigns/completed/sersio_2004/040116/DSCF0153_resize.JPG -K
Hi!
As you can see from Steve’s pictures below, the payload and motors are now all on the rail. Tonight the crew are working on “rigging the umbis” which means connecting up the electrical harnesses so we can communicate with and power the payload with external batteries and communications before launch; and also building a styrofoam “house” around the payload to keep it warm on the rail. You can see the sort of dryer-hose looking contraption that blows warm air up into the foam block house. (The styrofoam house is basically blown apart when the first motor fires.) The entire rail is horizontal at the moment, and enclosed in a sliding house which can be pulled away from the launchrail and payload on two rails. Then the rail can be raised to “vertical” launch position for launch. (Actually we launch several degrees off vertical…we don’t want it to come back down on our heads.) On the payload you can see lots of “red tags”, that are to be “removed before flight”; they are connected to things that have to come off before flight. The darker grey areas on the payload skin are the antennas, for telemetry (all the data are transmitted during the flight, to dishes here at Ny Alesund and also in Tromso), and for GPS reception (so we know where the payload is.) Note that collecting GPS data on a receiver that is spinning at 1 to 6 Hz is not a simple task…. This afternoon the science team had a conference bringing together the rocket group, the optics groups, and the radar people. Most of the scientists are in Longyearbyen where the Eiscat radars are. The science group will have a “practice run” tomorrow morning from 0400-0900 UT (0500-1000 local time, or 0700-noon magnetic local time). We will exercise the radars, the cameras, the meridian scan photometers, and any other instruments we can get our hands on. Tomorrow morning at 10 local time we will have the “practice count” for the rocket as well, running through the entire prelaunch and launch sequence in its entirety (except for actually firing the motors.) If all goes well, we will take Friday afternoon and evening off, and have our first real countdown early Saturday morning. The science window is from 0500-1000 UT on Saturday (0600-1100 local time), so the team will have “station time” at 0200 UT (3:00 am local time) on Saturday morning. The biggest concern at the moment is the fact that the cafeteria goes by extremely strict times, and breakfast doesn’t start until 7:30am (10am on weekends!) We are all hoping we don’t starve to death by the end of Saturday morning’s window. Perhaps we will smuggle out lots of crackers, etc, from Friday night’s dinner…. More tomorrow on the logistics of the launch call.
-K
Lots of progress has been made today with the motors, and the payload has been moved from the payload assembly building down to the blockhouse (see the pictures from Steve and Eric, attached). In the pictures you can see two of the motor stages: the big black one with the fins is the Black Brant, and the smaller cylinder with no fins is the Nikha (it has no fins because it does not start burning until the first two stages (the Brant and the Terrier) have taken it out of the atmosphere, so there’s no air for the fins to push on.) The fins on the Terrier and the Brant are canted very slightly (about 2 degrees) which makes the entire rocket spin like a rifle bullet for stability.
The Terrier motor is already hung on the rail.
In the top pictures you can see the assembled payload being packed up to be moved to the blockhouse. In the bottom pictures is an arctic fox; they live below one of the building in the complex. They look like bouncy fat cats.
Our web page is getting a few days behind but hopefully this will be remedied soon. There is another web page with lots of pictures at http://www.rocketrange.no/campaigns/completed/sersio_2004/ which is maintained by the Andoya Rocket Range personnel.
What we want is big flows (narrowly spaced contours) across and south of Svalbard, sometime between 0700 and 1200 UT.
I hear it’s pretty cold (“infinitely cold” says Joo) in Hanover, but it’s colder here!
-K
Hello all!
I am here at the launch site and all is well. The launch facility is at Ny Alesund, on the west side of the island of Spitzbergen in the Svalbard archipelago. We are at 78 degrees latitude. It was very odd to watch the sun set in the south behind the plane as we flew north from Tromso. I left Hanover Friday afternoon, and went Boston-London-Oslo-Tromso-Longyearbyen-Ny Alesund, arriving here today around noon. Flying over Tromso and Svalbard is amazing; the mountains look unfinished, like pointy meringues. Svalbard is in 24-hour dark, but there is a full moon which illuminates the mountains and the water from the plane. It is eerie and beautiful. When I got here the payload team was just finishing some final tests on the “buttoned-up” payload; all the instrumentation and support electronics are fully built up and “buttoned-up” inside the payload skin and nosecone. Last night the great excitement was the arrival of a (huge!) Norwegian Coast Guard cutter/icebreaker ship carrying our new rocket motors (along with 80 members of the Norwegian Coast Guard). They arrived about 11pm, craned the motors onto the dock, toured the rocket facility, and left again by 2am. Talk about ships passing in the night. So now we have motors and the payload buildup can proceed. (The first set of motors were sent on a ship that got stuck in the ice and froze waiting for the icebreaker ship.) It will take the motor crew several days to inspect, assemble, and “hang” (mount on the launch rail) the motors before we can do final testing and start preparations for launch. In the meantime we will work on coordinating the science data input that we will use to “call” the rocket launch (decide when to launch.) I’ll write about that tomorrow.
The launch facility here at Ny Alesund is part of a larger science station facility. There are only about a hundred people here at most, maybe more like 50 or 60. We are only 100 km from Longyearbyen (to which you can fly on regular commercial flights) but from Longyearbyen to Ny Alesund there is only a twice-a-week flight over the mountains, there are no roads to here. Besides the auroral studies, there are atmosphere, climate, geologic, and biological studies here. You can see more about the Ny Alesund facility at www.kingsbay.no and under “SvalRak” at www.rocketrange.no (note that the main Norwegian rocket range is “Andoya” but we are at “SvalRak”; this is what led to the confusion about our payload shipment going missing over Christmas.) I have attached a few pictures of the payload being built up: our detectors mounted on booms inside the payload; the nosecone being slipped over the instrumentation, and the science/instrumentation team (except for me as I wasn’t here yet). More tomorrow!
-K
On the main-payload we removed all detector covers and installed the nosecone. We then stacked the main-payload on the Imager section and then on top of the sub-payload. This completed the payload assembly. We are preparing for a payload turn-on health check inside of the assembly building, followed by a GPS outdoor test which will probably take place tomorrow. We have not yet seen the ice breaker and the latest word is that it should arrive sometime late tonight with our rocket motors.
We performed latching tests on the four main-payload booms. The payload was clamped to a fork lift, inclined by 5 degrees, and each of the booms were deployed. The sub-payload COWBOY wire booms were wound.
We are expecting the rocket motors by ice breaker within the next 12 hours.
Today we installed payload instruments and performed a sequence test. We are reviewing records and intend on performing the final main-payload build-up today and tomorrow. We received a confirmation one hour ago that the C-17 Air Force plane with our rocket motors arrived in Andenes. We expect the ship to arrive with the motors on Monday.
In the top two pictures, the rocket motors’ arrival. The bottom left picture is of the ongoing work on the payload. The bottom right shows Marc Lessard and Paul Kitner at the launch site. Paul Kitner is the principle investigator for the mission.Below are two photos of the payload with the detectors mounted. The detectors are wrapped in plastic bags and are under a dry nitrogen purge to keep their sensitive elements protected from water vapor.
Breaking news: The one mission critical factor to be resolved is delivery of the rocket motors. Because the original motors may have experienced out-of-spec temperatures (low), they have been returned for x-ray tomography. New motors are now scheduled to be flown to Andoya by C-17 directly from Wallops Flight Center on Friday January 9. From there a Norwegian ice breaker will transport them to the Ny Alesund rocket range arriving about January 13. The Svalbard treaty prevents direct military flights into the archipelago requiring the ice breaker for the last leg of the journey. Note this will affect the commencement of the launch window. The earliest possible commencement date is January 17.
Window times: Start date to be determined (see above). Preliminary window open is 0600 UT and window close is 1100 UT. Times will be adjusted longer if the start date is further delayed.
Weather Conditions: Warm, close to freezing, with light snow/rain and gentle winds. A cooling trend with clearing skies is predicted over the next several days.
Auroral conditions: No emissions are visible through clouds. There is no ground magnetic activity. Kp is low, 1-3, and the solar wind speed is 500 km/s and decreasing.
Rocket/Payload status: The payload buildup continues on schedule. Time permitting, a sequence test will be conducted this evening. Note that even though the work day is 8:00 AM to 8:00 PM, the technical staff may quit an hour early today to watch a free Swedish comedy dubbed in English with Norwegian subtitles. The rocket motors are scheduled to be shipped to Andoya and carried to Ny Alesund by icebreaker as noted above.
Scientist locations on January 8, 2004:
Kristin Frederick-Frost Ny Alesund
Paul Kintner Ny Alesund
Eric Klatt Ny Alesund
Mark Lessard Ny Alesund
Kristina Lynch New Hampshire
Images: Two images of the next generation of rocket scientists working on the payload.
We have been very busy assembling the payload. Kevin performed a bench check of the Dartmouth electronics boxes followed by an initial in-payload checkout by Kristen and Kevin on Tuesday, followed by a more extensive in-payload checkout today. The detectors are being mounted on the booms as I write this message Wednesday afternoon. Eric and Steve performed telemetry checks and optical encoder calibration on the sub-payload. We are on a path that should permit us to perform a sequence test of the entire payload late Thursday or early Friday.
A Weather Update: The weather here has dramatically warmed to above freezing with some rain and mixed precipitation and poor visibility. When we first got here it was cold, clear, and much Aurora was visible. Hopefully those days will come back again soon.
Kevin Rhoads and Kristen Frederick-Frost test the particle detector electronics boxes after the boxes have been mounted on the payload structure, and before the detectors are attached.
Marc Lessard prepares the onboard imager for payload buildup.
Kevin Rhoads bench tests the electronics boxes for particle detectors in preparation for payload buildup.
Marc Lessard and Kristen Frederick-Frost converse in the payload assembly building.
Steve Powell works at assembling payload.
Equipment, having arrived, is being assembled in the payload assembly building.
The payload nosecone.
Important flight hardware.
Today: The first plane with some of the payload hardware and support equipment arrived. We estimate that it will take 4 plane loads to transport the full shipment from Longyearbyen to Ny-Alesund. We hope to complete that task by the end of the day.
The photos below are of the arriving shipment, and the somewhat confusing shipping labels. The labels list both Andoya Rocket Range and Svalrak in Ny-Alesund. This confusing label contributed to the error that sent the shipment to Andoya first.
High noon.
New Year’s Eve Dinner.
Marc Lessard finds a friend in the dining hall.
The engineers and the Wallops team have arrived at the launch site (Ny Alesund, on the west coast of Svalbard.) However, there have been some difficulties with shipping, and the payload and equipment are still stuck in Oslo. Also, the original shipment of rocket motors got stuck in the ice not far from Ny Alesund, and froze, so new motors need to be shipped from Wallops. These difficulties will delay the start of the launch window from 15 Jan by at least a few days. In the picture, the Cornell engineers view their large but at present empty workspace… Reports are that at least there’s lots of nice aurora to watch.
