Wednesday, August 5, 2015

August 5th BARREL Daily e-mail

Hej och god morgon (Hi and good morning), 

Update Summary
MAKE SURE TO SUBMIT YOUR AGU ABSTRACT!!!! Deadline is midnight east coast time. 

Things are moving along here. We hope to have our flight readiness review tomorrow. If the Weather forecast improves we may push for an August 7th launch as there is a great conjunction between Van Allen Probes, MMS, and Kiruna.  The last we heard we may be able to have a 16 hour launch so if we launch in the morning the balloon should still be up for this conjunction. We'll keep you posted on this progress. 

Speaking of conjunctions, there are now KML files for both Van Allen Probes, all four MMS Satellites, and Firebird. THEMIS and Cluster are next on the list as well as the lines of constant L for the Northern Hemisphere. I was hoping to have a full list of possible conjunctions from Aug. 7th to the 11th by the time I sent this e-mail, but that didn't happen. I'll try to get it done by the end of today. 

News from Kiruna
Ground Weather:
Temp.:  15.1 C
Wind speed:  2.9 m/s with a max of 6.1  m/s within the last five minutes or so. 
Precipitation (rain):  0.0 mm But it was dizzying a bit. 

It looks like there may be a bit of rain over the next few days. You can see the forecast here http://www.wunderground.com/q/zmw:00000.1.02043?sp=ESNQ Currently it looks like the next clear day may be Sunday or Monday. However there is a chance of a thunderstorm on Tues.

Stratospheric weather:
At tomorrow's briefing we should be able to talk with the meteorologist and  start getting Stratospheric wind updates with rough predictions of the flight paths soon.

Payloads up: First possible launch date August 7th
N/A

Payloads coming down:N/A
News from EFW:
Summary
**For the last campaign we started out collecting at 16K and switched to 4K on 1/9/2014, presumably b/c we got completely blocked up with good data to telemeter. Spent majority of rest of mission playing it back. "Fortunately", the activity died off after the 12th or so, so this wasn't an issue. Another way to look at this is that the later inactivity saved our butts!


**I'm leaning towards 4K collection. We can still get some chorus this way and we can collect for about 4 days before filling up the buffer. 
The only real advantage of 16K is to use timing differences b/t two antennas to determine propagation velocity of time domain structures, like the ones Forrest discusses. But, these could be important to microburst precip. I've attached a plot from Malaspina's 2014 paper showing the MLT distribution of time domain structures from his RBSP survey. 

**We have sc contacts tomorrow, so we can upload collection requests for the 7th.  I think if you guys have any chance of launching that balloon on the 7th you should go for it! With the recurring high speed stream scheduled to hit, the early days may be our best chance at catching activity!

-Aaron

News from Firebird:
Summary
From Alex Crew yesterday: Flight unit 4 is completely full from our campaign 4, Flight unit 3 is 97% full (should fill up later today). We are finishing downlinking some of our hi-res and catching up on our context data, but should be able to meet an August 7th turn around launch.

Space Weather  from Spaceweather.comSWPC.noaa.gov , and Kyoto (possibly others as well)

Kiruna Magnetometer:  http://www.irf.se/Observatory/?link=Magnetometers
There appear to be no ULF waves, but there did appear to be a substorm last night right before 11:00 UT., Just around the time we brought the aurora imager in. We have to analyze the data to see if we happen to catch any of the auroral that may have been overhead.

GOES Electron Flux:
GOES 2MeV electrons remain slightly elevated.

GOES Proton Flux:
GOES proton fluxes are remaining nominal.

Solar wind speed: 
Vsw = 386.6 km/s

Solar proton density:
density = 4.8 protons/cm^3

Sun spot number:
68

Flare activity:
There are very small chances (<10 48="" a="" br="" class="" flare="" hours.="" in="" m="" nbsp="" next="" of="" or="" the="" x="">
Kp:
kp =  2 with a 24 hour max of kp = 3

SW magnetic field:
Bz = 1.2 nT north
Btotal =  4.4 nT 

Coronal hole news
There are no large coronal holes currently on the Earthward facing side of the Sun. 

AE:
AE is currently very quiet. 

Dst:
The  current Dst is very quiet

Swedish Phrase of the day:
From the Guy at the lunch counter 
Hōgt -Flygande Planer - Plans that fly high

Hej då och bra kväll från Kiruna (Good bye and good evening from Kiruna), 

Alexa and the BARREL team. 

No comments:

Post a Comment