STATUS -- Today was quite an exciting day. Of course, we STILL had strong winds in Andenes and AGAIN the rocket spent the day in bed, never getting out of its comfy shelter. Since we started the campaign, the solar wind has been very cooperative, which has made part of our job easier. On the other hand, winds at Andenes and wind and clouds at Longyearbyen have been a huge challenge. We really would like to see (with fancy cameras) the aurora over us in Longyearbyen! Fortunately, things seem to slowly be swinging our way. We had clear skies for much of today both here and at Ny-Ålesund, 100 km to the north. The temperatures here will be dropping, which helps ensure that skies will be clear. For Andenes, the forecast is for winds to be decreasing steadily over the next several days -- this is all very good news for us.

About today.... to make a long story short, we would have launched if we had not been down for winds. We got very good aurora, in the form of Poleward Moving Auroral Forms (PMAFs), which was quite well-behaved in the sense that it stuck around for something like an hour. As this aurora passed over the EISCAT radar we also observed ion outflow -- we had everything we wanted for this mission except the green light to launch. That's ok, this has still been an interesting, informative and useful day. Our time is coming...

OUTLOOK -- You guessed it, we'll be walking around with our eyes glued to the skies for the next several days. I suppose we'll be bumping into all of those people who text while they walk, though. Anyway, we (that is, "Earth") is currently immersed in a high-speed solar wind stream, with speeds over 600 km/s as I write this (that's over a million miles per hour!). A word of caution, though, is that densities often drop off dramatically with these high speeds. As long as the densities stay close to where they are, about 2 or 3 particles per cubic centimeter, we should be ok. The magnetic field strength is also holding steady.

OTHER -- This campaign benefits from many, many international contributions. One is the EISCAT radar, located very near KHO, where we sit. I think I mentioned EISCAT before (See here for more details and find/like them on facebook), but it consists of two HUGE dishes here. One is aimed permanently up the local magnetic field line and is 42 meters in diameter (yup, about half the length of a football field); the other is only 32 meters but can be steered to point at certain spots in the sky. The photos below are from a tour of the facility that we got today, with the first one showing Kjellmar Oksavik explaining how the radar works to Meghan and Bruce. The other photos show a shipping label and compressor from Dielectric Communications, a company in Raymond, Maine, who provided the waveguides and associated equipment for EISCAT (the rectangular "duct work" in the photo is not duct work at all, it is the large waveguide that is used to deliver the radio waves to the dish antenna). I knew about the role of Dielectric Communications in EISCAT because one of my brothers, Norm, worked for them at the time. This is my second day in a row with an "it's a small world" story! OK, I think I am done with that now..

Looking forward to tomorrow!!!!

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