This has been a quiet day for the science/instrumentation team, as the action has shifted today to the motor crew. As of yesterday, the payload was fully assembled and tested, and "buttoned up" in its skin and nosecone. Now we are waiting for the motor crew to assemble the new motors. To do this, they need to wire the igniters (this is like when you clip on the igniter plug to the bottom of an Estes rocket, only now the motor is bigger than you are, and the wires need to be carefully glued down along the side of the rocket motor.) Our rocket is a "3-stage-motor" known as a Black Brant X. See www.nsroc.com and http://www.nsroc.com/front/stable/stframe.html for a description of the various motor combinations used by NASA sounding rockets. The motors will carry our payload along a trajectory southwest of Svalbard, with an apogee (highest point) of 770 km and a range (horizontal distance) of similar distance. The science team has spent the day learning about the various real-time data sources that we will use to "call the launch" (decide when to launch the rocket.) We have a roughly 2-week window during which the moonlight is dim enough (less than a quarter moon) that we can see aurora, from 15-29 January. During that time, we need to find a good science event. For the SERSIO mission, the goal is to find a time when there is a significant, measureable motion of atmospheric ions (oxygen, mostly) out of the atmosphere and up into the ionosphere and magnetosphere. We are interested in this because we want to know how atmospheric ions are driven upwards to populate near-Earth space where satellites live. We measure this ion outflow using various radar facilities located in Svalbard and in northern Norway (Tromso), and Finland and Iceland. You can see some about the EISCAT radars at http://ion.le.ac.uk/eiscat/eiscat.html http://ion.le.ac.uk/eiscat/eis_intro.html and more about the Svalbard-based research at www.unis.no (look here also for more about the undergraduate student program called "University Courses at Svalbard", students come here from all over the world to study for a few terms. I came up on the plane with a geology student from Cameroon who planned to study the differences between volcanic and glacial mountains.) More about the auroral studies on Svalbard is at http://haldde.unis.no

During the launch window, most of the science team (except for me and Kristen) will be on the other side of Svalbard, at Longyearbyen where the EISCAT radars and optics are. They will work with the radar community to monitor the EISCAT data, and Kristen and I will work with the Ny Alesund scientists to monitor the optical aurora along the rocket trajectory. When we have a good event, and when many other logistical conditions are met (more about this another day), we can launch. But it will take us several days to get all of our ducks in a line so that we can recognize good conditions when we see them. Meanwhile we wait for the motor crew to finish the motor assembly (in record time we hope, but not too fast as it is dangerous to assemble these motors too quickly). We hope to begin real countdowns on the morning of the 16th.

Attached is a map of the planned rocket trajectory.

K