STATUS -- What a day! We began the day fighting the winds, as usual. We were GREEN, except that the grounds winds made elevating the rocket a bit risky, so that was initially delayed. Around 0700 UT, though, winds got better and the rocket was elevated. This was great, sort of.... except for the fact that a ship was inside of the hazard area downrange from the launcher. We were still early in the launch window so this turned out not to be an issue, but sheeesh!! As we (Earth) rotated towards the cusp and anticipation started to build, the winds also started to build, forcing the payload to be brought back to horizontal. Skies were clear in Longyearbyen (for the early part of today's window) and in Ny Alesund for the entire window, which made today much better than yesterday, in terms of knowing how the aurora was evolving. The answer was clear, too, with red aurora (i.e., soft electron precipitation) becoming increasingly widespread. There was one point during this stretch that we would have launched if we could have.

Aurora continued to develop and, a bit later, the CUTLASS SuperDARN radar in Finland came back to life, not only confirming that we were sitting in the cusp, but that we still had some time before we made an "Exit, stage right" from the cusp. The winds did settle down and the payload went back up again. Unfortunately (of course, you knew this was coming..), the ground wind variability prevented the launch. The image below, acquired by one of the allsky cameras provide by the group from the University of Oslo, show the situation. The red aurora is mapped above Svalbard, the rocket trajectory is the black line. You might think that we were going to miss the aurora, but this was just a brief interval - a couple of minutes later, that aurora broadened to the west. Actually, there was more than 2 hours of soft precipitation during this event. In the end, we sat fidgeting until the end of our daily launch window without being able to pull the trigger.

The various teams associated with this launch, including many people from many countries, have done some amazing work!

Aurora Gods: 2
Science Team: 0
..... and down goes the gauntlet!!

OUTLOOK -- The solar wind is expected to cooperate for at least the next couple of days. Ground winds, maybe not! The forecast for tomorrow is grim.. or worse, but we will be watching and hoping that the wind gods are on our side FOR ONCE, ready to react and go.

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