Space Physics at Dartmouth -- LaBelle Group | Dartmouth Balloon Group | Theoretical Group
ROPA - Update - January 18, 2007
We came very close to launching, dropping the count to T-2 twice tonight, and seeing lots of nice pulsating aurora right overhead in the clearest skies we've seen all week. However (there's always a however, it seems....) the pulsations never moved very far north, and we would have flown out of them before our particle detectors turned on. So we had to recycle the count each time. You can see in the attached figure the timeline of the auroral activity for the night. The Kaktovic magnetometer is on the north shore of Alaska, under apogee. The Fort Yukon is about 1/3 of the way north, and College and Poker are at the range. Every time the auroral currents strengthen into activity, it makes a magnetic deflection that the ground magnetometers can see. We dropped the count at the first big spike at 830 UT, and again at 9UT; at 11UT we switched over to the Larsen rockets but by the time the next big event came around at 1130 UT the skies in the north were too cloudy.
Things feel promising for tomorrow, we'll see!
We are promised continuing magnetospheric activity and relatively good weather tomorrow night....
-K