After the launch Saturday night, we at Fort Yukon began packing up and I returned to Fairbanks Sunday evening where the entire launch team had a very nice celebratory dinner. Monday we returned to Poker Flat Research Range to finish packing up our equipment and then early Tuesday morning I left for the home and made it back Tuesday night. Now I’m excited to get some sleep in my own bed and get ready to do some seriously data analysis.

Surprisingly, we’ve been getting crazy levels of press coverage of the launch! It’s been great, we’ve seen mention of our rocket from the Fairbanks local paper, CNN, MSNBC, Foster’s Daily Democrat (the NH Seacoast local newspaper), and spaceref.com among others. Here’s the official press release from UNH (with my name specifically mentioned). Amazing videos and photos of the launch have popped up everywhere, here are some:

Thanks for all who followed this blog through the launch, I hope you found this adventure as fun and interesting as I did and I hope that you’ll continue following this blog as I chronicle my experiences in grad school and new science that’s happening around the world.

Here’s a run down of the week:

• Launch Window Day #1 — Mon 2/13 8pm-2am– The first few hours of the window were used for final preparations and checks on the payload by the Wallops crew down at Poker Flat.  We had some breaks in the clouds, but the aurora was not strong enough or in the right place to consider launching. It’s good for us though, because we were better able to arrange our equipment here at Fort Yukon.

• Launch Window Day #2 – Tues 2/14 8pm-2:30am – So, the way the launch works is prior to the start of the window we count down from T-2 hours to T-10 minutes, “T-” means time to launch. Then we hold at T-10 minutes until we get some promising aurora, when we advance the countdown to T-2 minutes. Then we hold there until we get ideal conditions and decide to launch. Tuesday night we dropped the count down several times and had very good aurora, but it did not organize itself into the type of arcs in the right place, that we are trying to study.  The aurora was absolutely amazing. It was my first time ever really seeing it and it was absolutely awesome in the most basic sense of the word. We got quite a show here at Fort Yukon and standing outside it seemed like I couldn’t turn around fast enough to see all of the amazing activity. It was absolutely breathtaking. I wish everyone the opportunity to see it, it’s right up there with natural wonders like the Grand Canyon; I know these videos don’t quite capture the awe of the aurora that you get in person, but here are a few time-lapse videos from that night (aurora 1, aurora 2, aurora 3). This night we came very, very close to launching, getting as low as 36 seconds from liftoff before holding the count.  The auroral activity was actually much greater than anyone here or elsewhere would have predicted (this article is a great example of bad pop-science writing).  And the skies were clear at most of our sites for more than half of the launch window.  Extended the window to 2:30 am in hopes of getting the aurora to reorganize into arcs, but it never did.

We (University of Alaska-Fairbanks grad student Jason and I) got a quick tour of the village of Fort Yukon. It’s a very small little place, with a population of about 700 people and almost all of them are natives who’ve lived here their whole lives. There are no roads in or out; in the winter you can use snowmobiles or dog sleds or fly and in the summer locals use river barges. Possibly the oddest part is the high number of junked cars that litter the town; many of them look like they have been abandoned, sitting for decades with broken windows and rust and snow on the inside. Between all the busted cars and the small dilapidated and abandoned houses, the village almost resembles something out of a movie about the nuclear apocalypse.

On Tuesday, we tested the DERPA boom for the first time. The concept of the rocket payload is that once the rocket reaches space (a height at which it is clear of most of the atmosphere) the payload will be isolated and in free fall. At that point, small pyros (explosives) will be ignited, freeing all of the instruments that have been stowed on the main payload, safely tucked in beneath the nosecone. Once the pyros blow, the boom arms holding the instruments will be deployed. Of course, we need to test these booms before we launch to prove that the arm won’t break off. We tested the boom by deploying it at 45-degree angle and it latched very successfully, just as we planned. Here’s a link to a video of the deployment test.

Later in the day we went through a full sequence test. This is where we simulate an entire countdown and launch in the computers. Meaning, we don’t actually launch, but we do a countdown and turn the instruments on and off and deploy the booms at the correct times to make sure that the computers register all of the activity correctly. Everything went extremely well in the sequence test, yet another good sign.

The GPS failure was only a slight setback, the good folks back at Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia sent us a backup and we finally got her installed yesterday (Wednesday). After that we had a sub-payload “rollout”, same procedure as we had on Monday for the main payload; everything on the sub (including the ERPA) worked nicely.

So as you can see everything’s been moving along nicely. Today (Thursday) is actually my last day on the range. Tomorrow I’ll be heading up into the Arctic Circle, to Fort Yukon. The maximum height of the rocket’s trajectory, or apogee, will actually be just west of Fort Yukon. Here’s actually a map that shows the flight trajectory for MICA. The launch site at Poker Flat is near the bottom. Fort Yukon can be seen where the two rivers (blue squiggly lines) diverge between 66- and 67-degrees latitude. The target-like blue reticle is the targeted landing site. The black line running almost due north from Poker Flat to the center of the blue target is the proposed flight trajectory. The red zones emanating from the launch site are the different zones of influence for the launch; these basically rate how significantly the launch will influence these areas. Ideally we’ll be looking to launch into a stable auroral arc almost directly over Fort Yukon. I’ll be stationed there taking images of the aurora to help support the launch.

Here are some photo updates of what’s been going on.

Last night there was a bit of a setback when the range (and a fair bit of the city of Fairbanks) lost power. The newspaper this morning attributed the outage to a failed insulator and luckily everything is back up and running now with very minor impact on the mission.

The good folks from Wallops Flight Facility have been working very hard at getting all of the pieces of the payload together. The rocket is a two-stage TERRIER-BLACK BRANT MK1 (Mark 1). That means it’s has two motors, a TERRIER and a BLACK BRANT IX. The rocket’s payload looks something like this:

Here's the layout for the MICA sounding rocket, a Black Brant IX rocket. "Exp" means "experiment", "NMACS" is the automated control system that controls the rocket, telemetry is the rocket's communication or data relay systems, the "BB Ign" is the BLACK BRANT ignition. To the right in the layout (or below all of the payload) would be the two rocket motors.

All of the science experiments sit in the Aft Exp area, that’s the main payload, or in the sub-payload section. There are two ERPA instruments that I built (explained in a previous post) on a boom on the main payload and one mounted to the front deck of the sub-payload. Once the both stages (both motors) have fired, the nosecone will detach from the payload and then the main and sub-payloads will separate and the instruments will turn on. This involves booms being extended too. The payload’s full instrument suite looks like this:

Here's a full diagram of MICA's science instruments. The ERPAs which I built are located in a pair on a boom on the main payload (depicted here on the right side) and at the front (top) of the sub-payload.

Below are some pictures from around the range and the ERPAs on the main payload.

As far as the launch goes, my job has basically been a lot of sitting around. The main parts of the rocket and the payload arrived yesterday afternoon. At that point, all of the rocket folks from Wallops Air Force Base got to work on unpacking and prepping things; that’s also when I and the experimenters from Dartmouth left. Today is more of the same for me, sitting around waiting. Our instrument, the ERPA, is already on the rocket, so I just need to wait until they’re all set putting stuff together. Yippee.

• RESEARCH UPDATE: My research has been going along quite swimmingly. Loyal readers will remember back in the summer when I posted about receiving a research fellowship from NASA. This summer, as a part of that project, I began building an instrument for the Magnetosphere-Ionosphere Coupling in the Alfvén resonator (MICA) sounding rocket mission. The instrument, called an Electron Retarding Potential Analyzer (ERPA), is what’s known as a “top hat” electrostatic analyzer. This means, the ERPA uses electric fields to attract/guide electrons into the detector and measure their energy. Acquiring an energy distribution of a population of particles, in this case electrons, gives us a temperature. Electron temperature is just one small part of the in situmeasurements the MICA rocket will make as it flies through the aurora over Alaska. Below are some pictures of the ERPAs as they were being built.

  The ERPAs were then shipped down to Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia for testing and integration with the rest of the MICA payload’s instruments. They’re now be shipped to Alaska for launch. Yes, that’s right I said Alaska, where I will be heading next week for launch myself. The rocket will be launched from Poker Flat Rocket Range, just outside Fairbanks, where I’ll spend a week preparing the ERPAs for launch before I fly up to Fork Yukon (see map below) where I’ll take images of the aurora from the ground as the rocket flies through it.

Map of Alaska showing where I'll be during the MICA launch. Poker Flat is right in the middle of the state, just northeast of the city of Fairbanks. I'll then fly to Fort Yukon, about 100 miles north.

• At the Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union (which is oddly always held in December) out in San Francisco, I had the pleasure of meeting two very cool people. The first was UNH Alumnus and current NASA researcher C. Alex Young, who has created a very cool website called The Sun Today which offers facts about the Sun, updates on solar weather, and a whole lot more stellar media and information (sorry for the pun). You should check out the website and visit the Facebook page for more info. The second person I met was a very awesome little gal named Camilla. Camilla is a chicken that works for NASA. In fact, Camilla is a chicken that is training to become an astronaut. As part of the public eduction and outreach for NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO), Camilla has joined the Astronaut Training Program and is quickly on her way into space. For more information about Camilla and the exciting stuff she’s up to, you can check out her Facebook page or her about.me website. I even got a picture with her!

Here's me and Camilla hanging at a restaurant in San Francisco. I was obviously way more excited about this introduction than she was...

•  Finally, since I can’t leave you without an awesome picture, here is a great shot of the Sun celebrating the Chinese New Year. As explained by the NASA Solar Dynamics Observatory (Little SDO) Facebook page:

Gong Xi Fa Ca! Happy Chinese New Year. It is the Year of the Dragon, the most powerful of the Chinese zodiac.

A month in the Chinese calendar spans a single lunar cycle. The first day of the month begins during the new moon, when no sunlight falls on the lunar hemisphere that faces the Earth. A lunar cycle, on average, lasts 29.5 days, so a lunar month can last 29 or 30 days. Usually, there are 12 lunar months in a Chinese calendar year. In order to catch up with the solar calendar, which averages 365.25 days in a year, an extra month is added to the Chinese calendar every two or three years. As a result, Chinese New Year falls on different dates each year (in the Gregorian calendar) between January 21 and February 21.

Each year of the Chinese lunar calendar is represented by one of twelve animal symbols of the Chinese zodiac: Rat, Ox, Tiger, Rabbit, Dragon, Snake, Horse, Sheep, Monkey, Rooster, Dog, and Boar. For 2012, it’s the dragon’s turn. According to Chinese astrology, people born on the year of the dragon are said to be strong, self-assured, eccentric, intellectual, and passionate, among other things.Chinese New Year celebrations traditionally lasts 15 days, from the first day (during a new moon) to the 15th day (a full moon). Each day holds a special significance that varies according to local traditions. 

This amazing image from the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) shows a fierce (slightly enhanced) coronal mass ejection (CME)- a blob of super hot and super energetic particles- blasting off the surface of the Sun.

• First off, as this blog has been (or attempting to) chronicling for most of the summer, NASA finally ended the Space Shuttle program after the successful return of the final mission of Atlantis on July 21. The shuttle ran an amazing 30 year history and is still to this day the most sophisticated vehicle ever constructed by man. NASA and the U.S. government now have to wait and hope (with bated breath and some hard finger crossing) that private companies quickly ramp up the development and advancement of private launch capabilities. Several big-time frontrunners in the commercialization of space exploration (SpaceX, Orbital Sciences, etc.) have hit major setbacks, failures, and are going way over budget.

• Next up, here is a very cool picture from the Opportunity rover on Mars. Yes, that’s right Opportunity found metal on Mars! How cool is that!??!! But yeah, not the giant pieces of scrap metal that are in the background, NASA is actually interested in that strange metallic-looking rock in the foreground to the left. That’s the real prize. The scrap metal (which I  half expected to see wrecked R2-D2 and C-3PO somewhere near…) is not some failed attempt at Martians to reach space, it’s actually Opportunity‘s own heat shielding that was abandoned during the rover’s descent back in 2004. The rock though, found to be made mostly of dense metals iron and nickel, is thought to be just as alien to Mars as Opportunity‘s heat shielding. Scientists believe the rock to be a meteorite much like the vast number found in Antarctica here on Earth.

It's not the scrap metal here that interests scientists, but the small metallic rock in the left foreground.

Firstly, a little update on why I’ve been so quiet. We’ve been quite busy in the lab finishing up proposals. Just to give you an idea, in a two week span my boss had 4 proposals due, meaning the graduate student office was like a sweatshop of proofreaders. All in all we got them all finished and are pretty optimistic about them, but things were pretty hectic for awhile. While all that was going on, I received word from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center that I was awarded one of their Graduate Student Research Program (GSRP) fellowships; basically I guess that means I work for NASA now (life goal #1, accomplished). It’s not really that big of a deal though, it just means that I have my own money to pay my stipend and will allow me to fund my own trips to conferences and buy my own resource materials without having to get paid off my boss’s grants. In return for all of this great NASA funding, I’ll be working with a Goddard scientist (Dr. Thomas Moore) and will have to make trips down to Greenbelt, Maryland to meet with him regularly and attend a symposium down there with all the other fellowship recipients in September. Seems like a pretty sweet deal to me.

In related science news, I spent last week at a scientific conference in Santa Fe, NM (a safe distance from the wildfires- although we could see them on the horizon). The conference, the National Science Foundation‘s (NSF) Geospace Environment Modeling (GEM) annual workshop, was actually a joint session with another group of scientists, NSF’s Coupling, Energetics and Dynamics of Atmospheric Regions (CEDAR) and was attended by roughly 400 scientists from all over the world. In case you haven’t figured it out, scientists can be sort of snooty and extremely specialized (read cliquey) when it comes to their science. Because of that there a several different annual conferences that break the larger realm of space physics down into subclasses; GEM is for people who study primarily Earth’s magnetosphere (the realm of influence of Earth’s magnetic field), while CEDAR is for those who focus on the ionosphere (the uppermost layer of Earth’s atmosphere), then of course there’s NSF’s Solar, Heliospheric, and INterplanetary Environment (SHINE) conference that focuses on the Sun and the region between the Sun and Earth. Yeah, lots of sub-categorization and sub-classification, although a lot of these people tend to work on similar things. For example, the research my group does involves the aurora, a phenomena that technically involves both the magnetosphere and ionosphere, but you can’t really be both a CEDAR person and a GEM person (since the conferences are usually held simultaneously in different places). It’s so odd. In any case though, the meeting was very interesting; long days of talks and finally meeting people who I’ll be working with and have been hearing about since I started in the lab. It seems like the sounding rocket community who my lab work with are a great bunch of people, so I’m very excited about that. But now I kind of need a week of recuperation after a week of science; conferences are not for the faint of heart.

So as I get back to the daily grind of laboratory work, I will leave you all with an interesting article from space.com‘s comprehensive coverage of the end of the space shuttle program (Atlantis is slated to launch this Friday, July 8, on the final mission) that asks whether or not the space shuttle program was worth the $209 billion it cost. In my mind it absolutely was; the space shuttle is still to this day the most advanced vehicle ever built by humans. What do you think though?