Lynch Rocket Laboratory - Dartmouth College

This picture was taken though the window of the glass observing room by Kyoung-Joo Hwang, a member of the science team.

The engineering crew has the day off, so that means that just the science team is out at the range. The Poker Flat Rocket Range is 30 miles outside of Fairbanks. It was a cloudy night in Fairbanks, but stars could be seen at Poker. The night was used as a "practice count" for the science observations. In order to call the launch, we need to monitor the auroral environment, from the input (solar activity as seen by the ACE satellite), through the Earth's near-Earth space (the shape of the magnetosphere as seen by the GOES satellite), down to the ground (electric currents across Canada seen by magnetometers (CANOPUS and the Alaska chain), to become aurora as seen by eyes and cameras. Data from these monitors can be accessed from the Real Time Spaceweather page of this site.

If you were to look at the data from Saturday night you would see that it was a very quiet night. The solar wind speed is slow and there is not much going on. Since solar activity has a 27-day cycle caused by the Sun's rotation period, we can make a prediction as to when things should pick up; it seems that March 5-10 is our prime time. However, only roughly half of the auroral activity is predictable on a month-to- month basis, so we may be surprised any day! Sunday, is the first official day of our window for launching. The moon is still coming up very early and full, though, so the window is only from 8-10pm; our "normal" windows will run from 9:30-3:30.

Below is a "conde-gram" by Paul Kinter of the solar wind speed (named for Mark Conde who made the first plots like this). This plot shows the periodicity of the solar wind velocity. If you extrapolate the spiral out for a few days you can see that we would expect increased activity around March 5th.