Running out of time
Night after night, a trio of necessary launch conditions remained elusive. One last chance remained
We are currently at T-minus 8 minutes and counting.... Tonight is the last night of the countdown, and it sounds like we are finally, potentially, getting an opportunity with clear skies in Bermuda, so we are, again, crossing our fingers and hoping that pans out. There is a possibility we will do a 3-minute hold, but we are hoping that is not the case.
PETER DELAMERE NEEDED TRIPLE 7s on a slot machine to make this work. After more than a week of trying, he had just a few chances left to hit the jackpot of good conditions at Wallops, Bermuda and for the aircraft.
Weather and high-altitude wind at Wallops had to be at an acceptable level. Too strong, and the unguided BlackBrant would be sent off course. Too many clouds, and photography and videography would be affected.
UAF graduate student research Kylee Branning flew aboard a Gulfstream III from NASA’s Langley Research Center to monitor the KiNET-X experiment. Photo courtesy of Kylee Branning
The wind also had to be in a satisfactory range when the Gulfstream III from NASA’s Langley Research Center carrying Branning, the UAF doctoral student, would be in position to gather data with cameras from the space agency’s Mobile Aerospace Reconnaissance System team. Excessive turbulence would disrupt measurements.
And at Bermuda, the weather at and just north of the island needed to be clear enough for the hoped-for glow of the ionized barium cloud to be photographed and video recorded.
Getting good imagery from the air and at both ground locations is essential for mission success – and is why Delamere faced great pressure on this Sunday night in the packed Wallops control room.
It all had to happen not just within the night’s 50-minute launch window but also within one of just five 10-minute windows within that time block. The circling Gulfstream would need several minutes to loop back to the correct location if a launch couldn’t occur because of unacceptable conditions at Wallops or Bermuda.
Camera equipment on the NASA aircraft. Photo courtesy Kylee Branning
“We need the airplane traveling westbound as we have clear skies, and then the launch, and then it's about seven or eight minutes to release the two barium packages to create the ion cloud,” Delamere said. “So there's a lot happening in just a few minutes.”
The idea was to get data from the two ground locations and from the aircraft to capture the distribution of neutral particles exiting the barium thermite canister, inventory the total number of ions produced from the interaction of the sun with that material and examine the structure and position of the created ion cloud.
“I learned from launching auroral rockets that you are always optimistic as the principal investigator,” Delamere said. “Even when you know there's not a chance in hell you're launching, you come in and you are ready to launch. You keep everybody on their toes.”
On this last possible night for a launch, a few clouds had moved in at Wallops. Temperature continued as it had for each of the previous launch periods, lingering in the upper 50s to low 60s with no rain. What mattered most, though, was the wind — not at the ground but from about 30,000 feet to 50,000 feet, where a subtropical jet stream flows.
UAF Research Associate Professor Don Hampton prepares camera equipment at Bermuda. Hampton recorded the KiNET-X mission from the island base. Photo courtesy Don Hampton
A jet stream had been flowing over Wallops the previous few days, rolling along at 100 to 130 mph at times. When it did subside, conditions at Bermuda weren’t favorable.
The wind on this final day of the launch window appeared, according to NASA weather balloons, much more favorable.
Far to the southeast in an Airbnb slightly inland midway along Bermuda’s north shore, UAF space physicist Don Hampton again looked at satellite weather maps as he had every day of this mission. He needed good weather not only at his camera station at the rental but also along a line of sight to where Delamere’s rocket would eject the barium canisters.
The red marker on this Google Earth image shows the Bermuda camera site location.
The two UAF scientists studied the satellite weather imagery, with Hampton also doing a visual check outside. As he looked out over the Atlantic late in the day’s launch window, he saw an opening and quickly passed the information to Delamere at Wallops via a chat program. Blandin, one of the UAF students, was at Delamere’s side at Wallops Range Operations to ensure the messaging was relayed.
“I had two or three satellite weather sources I was looking at,” said Hampton, a co-investigator on the experiment and, like Delamere, a UAF graduate and former student of Nielsen’s. “From all of that satellite data, we could extrapolate and say that the hole in the clouds we were seeing might be over here in two hours.”
“And it turns out it was.”
Top photo courtesy of Kylee Branning
