Balloon Launch and Sheep

This week, the Rocket Range is hosting the European Space Camp, where a group of high school students from all across Europe come here to learn about the rocketry and other science activities that go on here, and to put together and launch a rocket of their own, similar to the kind that the local school launched a couple weeks ago. On Tuesday, one group of these students put together and launched a radiosonde (a box of scientific instruments which is attached to a helium balloon and communicates the data to the ground by radio), and since this is also relevant to my research, I got to sit in on the lesson and watch the launch. Here are some pictures from it:

Balloon peeking up from inside the tower, about to be released

Balloon going up; scientific instruments hanging by a string

One interesting exchange that occured during this lesson was when the students were having a discussion on international affairs and the US-China relationship in particular. Someone asked me, "You're from the US, right? Do you hate communism?" I said "yes", not thinking too much and causing much laughter. To be honest, I'm not a free-market capitalist ideologue either, but I believe that communism inevitably leads to authoritarian regimes with serious human rights abuses, so I stand by my answer.

Since it was cloudy, there were no lidar observations at the time of this balloon launch, which left open the possibility of me launching a balloon myself, with funding (these things are expensive) provided by Trude, my Yale advisor. But now I realize that they launched balloons before the rocket launch that I blogged about a couple weeks ago, and since that was a clear day, there were lidar measurements too. So there's probably no need for me to launch my own balloon.

Another interesting thing that's happened recently is the flock of sheep that's been hanging out by the lidar observatory (see pictures below). They've been there every day this week, sometimes even getting in the way of cars on the road. They have bells hung around their necks, so they're obviously owned by somebody. I asked how the owners find them for shearing if they can just  wander anywhere--it turns out that every autumn, there's a big sheep roundup where they enlist a bunch of volunteers to drive around the island searching for sheep. The island is pretty big (35 miles long and 8 miles wide) but they must, after all, be somewhere on the island, unless they manage to walk across the bridge at Risoyhamn (see the "Excursion Part I post") to the next island, or get eaten by foxes (see last post). And there's not too many trees on the island, which makes the sheep easy to see, while the bells make them easy to hear. 

Sheep, from outside my office window (my office has moved since the fox pictures)

There were a couple black sheep mixed in. They seem to like drinking from puddles.

I don't know what the big concrete cylinder is, but I know it's not for feeding sheep. The sheep failed to realize this.

The Rocket Range's bikes have finally gotten out of the repair shop, so I can finally go to the grocery store and downtown Andenes without walking for several miles. They came in just in time, because I need a way to get downtown to pick up the Whale Safari boat on Sunday (which I'll definitely post about). Also, there's another rocket launch tomorrow, for the European Space Camp, which should be fun to watch if the weather is good. (If it's cloudy, the rocket will disappear into the clouds almost immediately.)