Lynch Rocket Laboratory - Dartmouth College

The picture above shows the 5 rockets on their rails; the picture is taken from the telemetry station up the hill from the launchers and also shows the nice steady auroral oval that we saw as we drove in to the range tonight. Pictures ViewFromTM_2.JPG and ViewFromTM_1.JPG show the launch pads in more detail; ROPA is the rocket on pad3, to the far right; the other 4 are the four payloads of the Joule2 mission which is sharing our window. The white rectangles you see are the styrofoam boxes which enclose th payloads and motors and are used to contain warm air that keeps them warm; the rockets are launched right through the styrofoam boxes.

Today we had better weather and good auroral activity; in fact we lowered the count from the T-10 minute hold where we sit for most of the night (which means that at any time we are ready to launch in 10 minutes); down to a T-2 minute hold (from which we can launch in two minutes, but we can only sit here for 30 minutes as it involves setting up roadblocks and having instrumentation getting hotter). However, though we had a (really pretty and swirly) auroral breakup and substorm, it never developed into the pulsating aurora that ROPA ("Rocket Observations of Pulsating Aurora") is designed to study. So we eventually recycled to T-10 and waited for the next event. We had a series of activity but cloudcover generally worsened throughout the night. Towards the very end of the window, we had pulsating aurora overhead Poker, but we can't use that because the rocket doesn't go straight up, it goes northward, so we need activity north of Poker.

We did though get the chance to study the pulsations with the AMISR radar, which looks very interesting. Pictures lpXvecX20070117X1115.jpg, lpXneX20070117X1116.jpg, and acXneX20070117X1114.jpg show some of the data from AMISR from the time of the swirly breakup earlier in the night; you can see the increased electron density in the ionosphere 100-120 km altitude caused by the precipitating aurora, and also the velocity vectors showing perpendicular flow velocities around the arcs. It is an amazing tool and will be a great enhancement to our studies. AMISR plots were provided by Craig Heinselman/SRI.

We are promised continuing magnetospheric activity and relatively good weather tomorrow night....