Subject: Cascades2 report for Sunday evening, Feb 15/16.


 First, our big news this evening is that we have
finally received permission to launch from NASA after
two weeks of intensive review of the ACS failure on
last month's Bounds mission, so this is very sweet. 
We're very grateful to the NSROC and NASA people who
worked long hours over the last 10 days to bring
this assessment to closure.
  So now we can settle into the business of waiting
for the aurora to come in and the clouds to go away...
Tonight for the first time we have left the rocket vertical
on the pad;  it will stay this way until we launch.
Meghan will post some pictures of the rocket on the rail
on the web page, it is boxed in styrofoam for heating
purposes.  It is very tall...
  The solar wind activity that has given us aurora
for the last two nights has died down, and based on
last month's activity and also on looking at STEREO
data, we are probably looking at a few days of extremely
quiet conditions.  Because of this and because of the
local meteorological weather (snow tomorrow) we will
stand down Monday evening;  this will mean that we
can after that go for 13 days to the end of the window
without having to take another day off.
  The payload systems all continue to be very well-behaved,
and we have also completed our PFISR interference testing.
Now we just need some aurora...