August 8th BARREL Daily Burst Telecon/Status Report

Hej och god morgon (Hi and good morning), 

Update Summary

Today turned out to be much nicer than the predictions, but a bit windy. Tomorrow we'll have the flight predictions for Monday, and if the ground weather is good, we'll try for a launch. 

We'll have a quick telecom tomorrow to update everyone on the launch possibilities and where the new high speed stream is relative to Earth according to ENIL.  

Let's hope for clear skies and low winds! 

News from Kiruna
Ground Weather:

http://www.irf.se/weather/
Temp.:  12.8 C
Wind speed:  3.4 m/s with a max of 7.1  m/s within the last five minutes or so.  Currently Monday looks like a bit cloudy 

Precipitation (rain):  0.0 mm 

Stratospheric weather:
The winds look like they haven't yet quiet set up. They are heading west and would only give us about a 10 hour flight at maximum.  We'll find out more tomorrow.

Payloads up: First possible launch date August 10th
N/A

Payloads coming down:N/A

News from Van Allen Probes:
Summary

They are confirming when there may have been lightning and burst taken, and if they can see any lightning induced whistlers. 

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, 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 Cluster:

From Fabien -  There is sadly no conjunction possible for a possible launch on 10 August. But the first good one is on 12 August at around 11 UT. Which with 6 balloons total is a definite possibility. 

News from Firebird:

Summary
From Alex Crew - As of noon Pacific yesterday, FIREBIRD had one last set of downlinks to make tonight, after which we anticipate clearing each spacecraft's memory during Friday's passes at which point they will automatically commence taking data. In the current data-taking mode, it is expected that the memory will last for approximately ~1 month of operations. I will update after we have completed the reset.

News from AeroCube 6
From Drew - AC6 will be running in high rate mode for all of August, meaning they will have 10 Hz sampling rate.

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

Kiruna Magnetometer:  http://www.irf.se/Observatory/?link=Magnetometers
It looks like we may be at the start of a substorm here in Kiurna. The HiT&MIS cameras are taking photos, but the clouds are coming in and out of view. Fingers crossed we saw something. Along with this possible substorm it looks like we have some ULF wave activity .

Finish Magnetometer Array: http://www.sgo.fi/Data/Pulsation/latestPulsation.php

Yesterday there was some strong ULF wave power, but no clear EMIC Waves. 

GOES Electron Flux:
GOES 2 MeV electrons appear to be returning to nominal values. However there is still a lot of structure associated with them.

GOES Proton Flux:
GOES proton fluxes are remaining nominal.

Solar wind speed: 

Vsw = 479.0 km/s

Solar proton density:

density = 4.9 protons/cm^3

Sun spot number:
95 - but there is one very big one (number 2396)

Flare activity:
Sunspot AR2396 is now in a beta-gamma configuration. For classification of sunspots see http://www.spaceweather.com/glossary/magneticclasses.html and http://www.spaceweatherlive.com/en/help/the-magnetic-classification-of-sunspots We currently have a 55% chance of an M-class flare. 

Kp:
kp =  2 with a 24 hour max of kp = 5

SW magnetic field:

Bz = 0.0 nT 

Btotal =  10.2 nT 

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

AE:

A slight increase in AE, perhaps a small substorm. 

Dst:

Dst is currently very quiet. 

Daily BARREL check in information: NO TELECON TODAY

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

Swedish Phrase of the day:

From Par - our safety guy at ESRANGE
Hopa Vindstilla - Hope for no wind! A very good hope we have for Monday morning. 

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

Alexa and the BARREL team. 

Status update from Robyn - We are go for Monday...

... well as long as the weather is good.

BARREL Status Report #5

August 7, 2015

Today our launch dress rehearsal was again delayed due to rain, but we closed out all action items and have been given Approval to Proceed from NASA. Monday morning, we'll conduct a launch dress rehearsal and compatibility test with Esrange equipment, as well as the Esrange FRR. If all goes well, and weather permitting, we will proceed with launch Monday late morning/early afternoon.

I would like to take this opportunity to thank everyone who worked so diligently over the last few days to get everything in order for our first launch!

Best

Robyn

Web Only Edition...

For those of you die hard blog readers, here's something special and only for you.  We saw a moose today while working on HiT&MIS and a rainbow once it stopped raining.

August 7th BARREL Daily Burst Telecon/Status Report

****UP DATE****

There will not be a telecom on Saturday or Sunday 

Hej och god morgon (Hi and good morning), 

Update Summary

It's been rainy hear again... well it was rainy here while we were trying to get the dress rehearsal of the flight and final NASA compliance completed. It is now a beautiful day. 

We also got our first flight predictions. It looks like we currently may be only able to get a 10 hour flight if we were to launch on Sunday. Although the winds are starting to set up, they are still heading west into the Norwegian Mountains, and we have to cut down the balloons before we hit reach them. 

So what does that mean? It means that with rain forecasted for Saturday, only a short flight that would not guarantee that we would get a conjunction with Van Allen, we've decided not to launch this weekend. We hope that if we can get NASA's final seal of approval, and good weather Monday morning, and then we'll really push to have a launch on August 10th. 

There is a large numbered sunspot turning earthward. It also looks like a broad high speed stream is starting to reach the eastern limb of the Sun. Next week could bring some nice space weather! 

News from Kiruna
Ground Weather:

http://www.irf.se/weather/
Temp.:  18 C
Wind speed:  2.3 m/s with a max of 4.3  m/s within the last five minutes or so.  Currently Monday looks like a beautiful sunny day! 

Precipitation (rain):  0.0 mm or so they claim... 

Stratospheric weather:
The winds look like they haven't yet quiet set up. They are heading west and would only give us about a 10 hour flight at maximum.

Payloads up: First possible launch date August 10th
N/A

Payloads coming down:N/A

News from Van Allen Probes:
Summary

Nothing new except for the August 10th possible conjunction. 

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, 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 Cluster:

From Fabien -  There is sadly no conjunction possible for a possible launch on 10 August. But the first good one is on 12 August at around 11 UT. Which with 6 balloons total is a definite possibility. 

News from Firebird:

Summary
From Alex Crew - As of noon Pacific yesterday, FIREBIRD had one last set of downlinks to make tonight, after which we anticipate clearing each spacecraft's memory during Friday's passes at which point they will automatically commence taking data. In the current data-taking mode, it is expected that the memory will last for approximately ~1 month of operations. I will update after we have completed the reset.

News from AeroCube 6
From Drew - AC6 will be running in high rate mode for all of August, meaning they will have 10 Hz sampling rate.

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

Kiruna Magnetometer:  http://www.irf.se/Observatory/?link=Magnetometers
There may have been something mid day-ish, but nothing really exciting.

Finish Magnetometer Array: http://www.sgo.fi/Data/Pulsation/latestPulsation.php

It looks like yesterday before noon (UT) and closer to local midnight there may have been some EMIC waves at a few of the stations. 

GOES Electron Flux:
GOES 2 MeV electrons appear to be returning to nominal values. However there is a lot of structure associated with them.

GOES Proton Flux:
GOES proton fluxes are remaining nominal.

Solar wind speed: 

Vsw = 531.9 km/s

Solar proton density:

density = 4.6 protons/cm^3

Sun spot number:
80 - but there is one very big one (number 2396)

Flare activity:
There is a 25% chance of an M-class flare, lets hope the sun spot gets more complex quickly, lets off a huge X-class flare, and then we have great weather on the 10th and have a massive geomagnetic storm while BARREL is up :).

Kp:
kp =  3 with a 24 hour max of kp = 5

SW magnetic field:

Bz = 4.3 nT south

Btotal =  7.4 nT

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

AE:

AE has been a bit active and it looks like there may have be a substorm starting. 

Dst:

Dst is currently very quiet. 

Swedish Phrase of the day:

From Chris
"jag ar pa semester": I'm on vacation Most of Sweden is on vacation during the month of August. But science, nor turn around winds, wait for anyone.  

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

Alexa and the BARREL team. 

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.com, SWPC.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. 

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.com, SWPC.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. 

August 4th 2015 BARREL daily update

Hej och god morgon (Hi and good morning), 

Update Summary

Things are moving along here under the dome here at ESRANGE. We have three payloads set up.  There is another balloon mission launch tomorrow morning, but we're  on track for a launch dress rehearsal Thursday morning and our flight readiness review with NASA on Friday.

There are now daily google Earth KML files for both RBSP and MMS in drop box. KML files for Firebird and THEMIS will hopefully follow soon. 

NOAA is predicting an increase in geomagnetic activity late in the day on August 6th due to a recurrent positive polarity high speed stream.

News from Kiruna
Ground Weather:

http://www.irf.se/weather/
Temp.: 15.0 C
Wind speed: 1.6 m/s E with a max of 3.5 m/s E within the last five minutes or so. 

Precipitation (rain): 0.0 mm

Stratospheric weather:
At today's briefing we talked with the meteorologist and we'll soon start getting Stratospheric wind updates with rough predictions of the flight paths.

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

Payloads coming down:N/A

News from EFW:
Summary
No news is good news

News from Firebird:

Summary
From Alex Crew: 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.com, SWPC.noaa.gov , and Kyoto (possibly others as well)

Kiruna Magnetometer:  http://www.irf.se/Observatory/?link=Magnetometers
Looks like there was a nice ULF wave, but it's below a Hz so hard to say exactly what frequency on the given Y-scale.

GOES Electron Flux:
GOES 2MeV electrons remain elevated.

GOES Proton Flux:
GOES proton fluxes are remaining nominal.

Solar wind speed: 

Vsw = 434.7 km/s

Solar proton density:

density = 4.1 protons/cm^3

Sun spot number:
62

Flare activity:
There are very small chances (<10 48="" a="" br="" class="" flare="" hours.="" in="" m="" nbsp="" next="" of="" or="" the="" x="">
Kp:
kp =  1with a 24 hour max of kp = 2

SW magnetic field:

Bz = 1.9 nT north

Btotal =  4.7 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

Daily BARREL check in information: First Telecon on August 5th 2015, tomorrow. 

Swedish Phrase of the day:

My hovercraft is full of eels -> Min svävare är full med ål

Why this phrase you ask? I forgot to ask a local for a good phrase for the day and googled Swedish phrases and this is what came up. See here

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

Alexa and the BARREL team.