All quiet at launch pad 2/N
The days slipped by as nature declined to cooperate for a challenging aurora experiment
From Launch Control we are at T minus 10 minutes and holding tonight for the launch of a BlackBrant 12 with the KiNET-X mission. Winds and surveillance are all green at Wallops Flight Facility. Bermuda currently has some clouds but is remaining very optimistic as the principal investigator indicates potential clearing.
MORE THAN A WEEK OF WAITING for the right conditions in a short nightly launch window had come to this: a few remaining minutes on the final night, May 16, 2021.
This had been 20 years in the making for space physicist Peter Delamere of the University of Alaska Fairbanks Geophysical Institute and the UAF College of Natural Science and Mathematics.
Everything had to be just right.
It had to be good not only at NASA’s Virginia coast rocket launch site where Delamere sat but also at more than 30,000 feet altitude for a monitoring aircraft and at an observation station at Bermuda, 715 miles distant across the Atlantic Ocean.
On pad 2/N, one of six pads at NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility about 100 miles southeast of Washington, D.C. and fronting the Atlantic Ocean, a 5-ton BlackBrant XII unguided sounding rocket stood affixed to a launch rail.
Within the 65-foot tall cylinder sat the components of the Kinetic-scale Energy and momentum Transport — KiNET-X — experiment, Delamere’s hope for helping answer a decades-old physics question about the aurora of Earth and other planets in our solar system.
Several miles away, Delamere sat — as he had on each of the eight previous nights — at Wallops Range Operations. The room appears as a mission control room is expected to appear: several rows of computer stations, allowing for about 10 people per row, all able to see the wall-sized monitors dominating the front of a dark-toned room.
Delamere, the KiNET-X mission’s principal investigator, occupied a station toward the front. NASA’s iconic red, white and blue logo loomed large on the wall to his left.
His window of time on this last day of the nine-day launch period: 8:04 p.m. to 8:54 p.m.
Fifty minutes.
It’s launch or go home and try again much later in the year — and at great additional cost.