The first day of AGU

Today is the first day of AGU! Warren, one of BARREL's students has his poster this afternoon. Good luck Warren! I'm sure you won't need it.

 Tomorrow we'll have a meeting with many of the teams of the Van Allen Probes to help coordinate burst data during our conjunction times. One of the big goals of this mission is to see how these space weather events look both in space as well as on the ground (the balloons are considered on the ground for all intents and purposes. Compared to the location of the satellites, the balloons are just off the surface of the earth.). The satellites will give us data about the waves observed as well as what particles are found at a given location. The balloons will give us information about how many of these particles have been pushed out of the magnetosphere and lost to the ionosphere/atmosphere. This is an incredibly important part of the problem which will help us better understand the variability of the radiation belts. If you haven't seen the amazing Rad Belt music video I highly suggest it. I've been told by an authority on the matter that it is quiet possibly the nerdiest music video out there.




Yesterday's mini GEM, while packed and Robyn and I both being over booked, was incredibly informative and useful. Now that the Van Allen Probes have been up and running for a few months everyone is excited about all this new data. In fact some said that they were drowning in it. The amount we have learned about our Earth-Space system in just the last two months has been astounding and we still have a couple years left in the main phase of the mission!