Monday, August 3, 2015

August 3rd 2015 BARREL Daily Update

Hej, 

Status:
The first round of the BARREL crew have made it to ESRANGE and are currently bench-testing Payload 1G. A preliminary compatibility test with ESRANGE equipment (transponders, secondary terminate) is scheduled for tomorrow morning.

Daily Telecom Schedule:
Diner is scheduled here for 6:00 local time and lasts only an hour, so we would like to schedule the daily telecoms one hour later than originally planned. This would mean that the new time and date for our first telecom is  August 5th at 7pm Kiruna time (13:00 Dartmouth time, 12:00 Minneapolis/Iowa time, 11:00 University of Colorado Boulder, 10:00 Berkley time)

Call in info:
Time: 7pm Kiruna time (13:00 Dartmouth time, 12:00 Minneapolis/Iowa time, 11:00 University of Colorado Boulder, 10:00 Berkley time). 

Phone number +1 641-715-3580
Access code 481960

Launch Plan:
Google Earth KML files have been made for the predicted trajectory files. All the KML files for the Sweden Kiruna campaign are in the Dropbox folder labeled "Kiruna". Currently they are very large files (~two week periods for the RBSP files and the whole month for the MMS files). This will be fixed, i.e. changed to daily files, very shortly and the FIREBIRD files for the campaign will be added once I run them.

We are still looking at an earliest possible launch date of August 7th. The upper level winds look like they may set up early this year so we may get to launch close to that date. After we become flight-ready, we'll have daily weather briefings at 2:00 pm Kiruna time to decide if we will try to launch the following morning. Those updates will be included here as well. 


Ground Weather 
High of 16 deg low of 8 deg (C, when in Rome). Partly cloudy with a low chance of rain. Ground winds of up to 10 km/hr. 

Stratospheric WeatherIt looks like the winds may set up early but we'll keep you informed as we get closer to mission ready.

Space Weather:
The Sun is currently pretty quiet, but there was just a large CME ejected on the far side. Fingers crossed this region stays active and is a sign of lots of space weather heading our way. Another hopeful sign is that the radiation belts appear to quiet well filled as you can see in the attached image. 

Kiruna Magnetometer
Quiet.

GOES electron flux
There is currently an electron flux event alert according to GOES 15. GOES 13 is currently seeing lower levels of electrons. However, both are rising.

GOES Proton Flux
Very quiet.

Space Weather from Spaceweather.com and SWPC.noaa.gov 
Solar wind speed: 482.9 km/s
Solar Proton density: 1.7 protons/cm^3

Sun Spot number: 51 (and a few bigger numbered spots) 

Kp  is quiet
Kp = 2 with a 24 hour max of Kp = 3

Bz = 0.6 nT North
Btotal = 4.2 nT

Coronal holes: There are no large coronal holes on the solar surface at the moment. ENIL is suggesting that there may be relatively low and narrow high speed stream that may hit the Earth on August 8th. 

From Kyoto 
AE: There may be a substorm currently going on. 

Dst: It is very quiet with minimums around -20 nT. 

Swedish phrase of the day : Coffee break = fikarast An important word for the jet legged and for any physicist in general. One might be able to get away with just Kaffe behaga = Coffee please. 

Hej då
Alexa and the BARREL team. 

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