I am here at the launch site and all is well. The launch facility is at Ny Alesund, on the west side of the island of Spitzbergen in the Svalbard archipelago. We are at 78 degrees latitude. It was very odd to watch the sun set in the south behind the plane as we flew north from Tromso. I left Hanover Friday afternoon, and went Boston-London-Oslo-Tromso-Longyearbyen-Ny Alesund, arriving here today around noon. Flying over Tromso and Svalbard is amazing; the mountains look unfinished, like pointy meringues. Svalbard is in 24-hour dark, but there is a full moon which illuminates the mountains and the water from the plane. It is eerie and beautiful. When I got here the payload team was just finishing some final tests on the "buttoned-up" payload; all the instrumentation and support electronics are fully built up and "buttoned-up" inside the payload skin and nosecone. Last night the great excitement was the arrival of a (huge!) Norwegian Coast Guard cutter/icebreaker ship carrying our new rocket motors (along with 80 members of the Norwegian Coast Guard). They arrived about 11pm, craned the motors onto the dock, toured the rocket facility, and left again by 2am. Talk about ships passing in the night. So now we have motors and the payload buildup can proceed. (The first set of motors were sent on a ship that got stuck in the ice and froze waiting for the icebreaker ship.) It will take the motor crew several days to inspect, assemble, and "hang" (mount on the launch rail) the motors before we can do final testing and start preparations for launch. In the meantime we will work on coordinating the science data input that we will use to "call" the rocket launch (decide when to launch.) I'll write about that tomorrow.

The launch facility here at Ny Alesund is part of a larger science station facility. There are only about a hundred people here at most, maybe more like 50 or 60. We are only 100 km from Longyearbyen (to which you can fly on regular commercial flights) but from Longyearbyen to Ny Alesund there is only a twice-a-week flight over the mountains, there are no roads to here. Besides the auroral studies, there are atmosphere, climate, geologic, and biological studies here. You can see more about the Ny Alesund facility at www.kingsbay.no and under "SvalRak" at www.rocketrange.no (note that the main Norwegian rocket range is "Andoya" but we are at "SvalRak"; this is what led to the confusion about our payload shipment going missing over Christmas.) I have attached a few pictures of the payload being built up: our detectors mounted on booms inside the payload; the nosecone being slipped over the instrumentation, and the science/instrumentation team (except for me as I wasn't here yet). You can see lots of other pictures, and campaign updates from before today, at www.dartmouth.edu/~aurora/sersio.html More tomorrow!

-K