Thursday, August 6, 2015

August 6th BARREL Daily Burst Telecon/Status Report

Hej och god morgon (Hi and good morning), 

Update Summary
It's been rainy hear and that has put a delay on our dress rehearsal at ESRANGE. That means that our first possible launch date has been delayed by at least a day. 

It looks though that we may be able to get a balloon up for August 9th or 10th when we have another couple of nice conjunctions and it looks like, according to ENLIL that we may have another high speed stream event. It also looks like a there is a larger Sun spot starting to come around to the earthward side of the sun. It seems like we may be in for some good space weather during this campaign! 

News from Kiruna
Ground Weather:
http://www.irf.se/weather/
Temp.:  13.3 C
Wind speed:  1.2 m/s with a max of 2.3  m/s within the last five minutes or so. 
Precipitation (rain):  2.0 mm 

Tomorrow it appears that it will be cloudy with the chance of some rain and Saturday is likely to be rainy. The winds are looking to be high for both days as well. 

Stratospheric weather:
Once we have the full weight of the payloads plus the terminate system that ESRANGE will add to our payload, we'll have a more accurate map of the expected flight paths and lengths. We do think though that the turn around winds may start to set up by this Saturday the 8th.

Payloads up: First possible launch date August 9th
N/A

Payloads coming down:N/A

News from THEMIS: 
From Xiaojia - I have put together a couple of close conjunctions (in L) between three probes of THEMIS and this BARREL balloon (attached), assuming that you launch at early local morning on August 7th and the geographic location is stabilized at esrange. Currently the THEMIS Ops team are working on implementing special time-based particle burst captures (at 128 Hz) during these intervals. 

News from Firebird:
Summary
Previously from Alex - 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 may have been a ULF from 10 - 11 UT this morning. It also looks like there may have been a substorm or two last night. It was raining though so we have no data from. We have to analyze the data to see if we happen to catch any of the auroral that may have been overhead.

Finish Magnetometer Array: http://www.sgo.fi/Data/Pulsation/latestPulsation.php
It looks like there were quiet a few nice ULF waves yesterday during the period which looked perhaps like a substorm here at Kiruna. 

GOES Electron Flux:
GOES 2 MeV electrons appear to be returning to nominal values.

GOES Proton Flux:
GOES proton fluxes are remaining nominal.

Solar wind speed: 
Vsw = 565.9 km/s

Solar proton density:
density = 3.4 protons/cm^3

Sun spot number:
87

Flare activity:
The chances of a flare have increased but remain at about 15% for the next 48 hours.

Kp:
kp =  4 with a 24 hour max of kp = 4

SW magnetic field:
Bz = 3.7 nT south
Btotal =  10.3 nT 

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

AE:
AE was elevated to about 1250 nT at about 9UT. It looks like it may have been a nice substorm

Dst:
Dst is currently very quiet. 

Swedish Phrase of the day:
From Chris 
See you soon Vi ses snart! Chris will be joining us soon to help launch the balloons!

And just because it's cool, here's a link to the video of the moon crossing in front of the Earth as seen by DSCOVR https://youtu.be/DMdhQsHbWTs 

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

Alexa and the BARREL team. 

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