I am staying at the Andøya Rocket Range (of which the Lidar observatory, where I'm doing my work, is a subsidiary), and they do, on occasion, launch rockets. The main focus is on launching "sounding rockets", which don't enter orbit but do often reach space. The purpose of these is to measure various atmospheric conditions, such as temperature, pressure, wind speed, and the ionization of the air, at a higher altitude than can be reached by weather balloons. The biggest rockets are launched in the winter, where they use them to study the Aurora Borealis and other wintertime upper-atmospheric phenomena; due to its location, Andenes is well suited to launching rockets that follow the earth's magnetic field lines, and other interesting flight paths.
In the summer, the rocket range focuses more on educational outreach. The first rocket launch that occurred during my time here was for the Andøya Ungdomsskole ("Teen School")--the students at the local school, who seemed around late middle school/early high school age, were responsible for building a small sounding rocket, and overseeing the countdown to the launch last Thursday. I was able to watch the countdown and launch from the User Science Operations Center (a legitimate "mission control"-type room), and it was interesting to see how the process worked.
This wasn't a water bottle rocket, or a model rocket with an A, etc. engine, like what I did in middle and high school--it was a legit multi-stage rocket, that actually reached an altitude of about 25,000 feet. I'm not sure exactly how big their role was or how well they understood the science involved, but it speaks well for the Norwegian educational system that the students at a small town public school have the opportunity to do this. Obviously, not all schools have a rocket range two miles away, but I imagine that such partnerships between public schools and scientific research facilities are common.
I was just a split second too late to actually catch the rocket in my picture, but here's the plume from the launch. The next launch will be on Friday, and will be for the European Space Camp, which will be staying in the rocket range's hotel next week (this should be interesting).
I won't be launching any rockets myself, but I may get to be involved in launching a radiosonde, more commonly known as a weather balloon, which serves basically the same purpose as a sounding rocket but is much cheaper, and intended for the troposphere, or lower atmosphere (which is what I'm interested in, since that's where all the weather happens). What I've been working on for the past few weeks involves using temperature and pressure data from a weather balloon to calculate a theoretical lidar profile, based on the assumption that assuming the air is clean and has no aerosols, and then comparing it to the actual lidar profile to obtain a profile of the aerosol concentration. But the data I've been using are from balloons launched in Bodø, almost 150 miles away, so I'd like to look at some data from Andenes to see how good an approximation the Bodø soundings are. They don't launch balloons from Andenes very often, but they'll be doing one next Tuesday, and I might also be able to launch another one, paid for using Trude's research funding, next time there's good weather so that the balloon will be simultaneous with the lidar measurements.
The lidar observatory, being on top of a mountian in a sparsely populated area, is visited by wildlife occasionally. Recently a wild fox walked up right outside the window, leading everyone to interrupt their work and look at it; pictures below. Today I saw three white animals that I thought were sheep or goats, but I didn't get a chance to investigate further.
I had to switch rooms on Wednesday because they needed to clean the old room, and apparently I had to vacate the room for them to do that. The new room is on the second floor and on the opposite side of the building--now, instead of facing the ocean, I'm staring right at the side of the mountain (see pictures below). But the construction was taking away the old view anyway, and now it's easier to make the room darker during the midnight sun so that I can sleep more easily.
This will probably be a pretty uneventful weekend, because I don't have any mobility--the Rocket Range inexplicably took the bike I was using away for repairs 2 weeks ago, with no word on when it will be returned. But next weekend, I intend to do a really sterotypical tourist activity: whale watching. The cruises leave from Andenes and people go out of their way to come to Andenes to get on the boat, so it wouldn't make sense for me to stay here for so long and not do it. There's a 90% chance of seeing whales--they actually use electronic detectors to find them--and they give you a free trip if you don't. If I don't have a bike by then I'll just walk several miles to downtown.
No comments:
Post a Comment