Daily e-mail Jan 8th 2013

Hello all, 

Payloads up as of 9:13 PST Jan 8th 2013: 

SANAE: 1J, 1K, 1M, 1N (as of 1235 UT)

Halley Bay: 1B, 1D

Payloads ready for flight as of 9:11 PST Jan 6th 2013:

SANAE:  Possible launch opportunity tomorrow, 1O is ready to go. 

Halley Bay: 1I is ready for launch and 1G is being tested. Weather expected to clear up tomorrow in time for a launch 

Payloads coming down:

1L: Connection with the payload was lost shortly after launch and it was never heard from again. We expect that it self terminated at 02:00 UTC. 

1B has been loosing altitude quickly and may have to be cut down today. 

Space Weather from Spaceweather.com

Solar wind speed is 330.3 km/s

Solar proton density 4.3 cm^(-3)

196 sunspots are now visible. NOAA has kept the likelihood of a M class flare at 35% and a 5% chance of an X class flare. 

Kp is quiet kp = 1 with a 24 max of kp = 1

Bz = 0.3 nT south

Btotal = 3.9 nT 

There are still the two holes which are at the westward limb and spanning across the upper middle portion of the sun. The SW from these holes are still expected to hit the Earth today or tomorrow. 

From Kyoto:
AE: at about 16:30 Jan 8th 2013 it looks like there could have been a small substorm or two. 

Dst: incredibly quiet! 

Update on KML Files: 

The KML files are back and I've almost caught up with all the reprocessing! If you copy your own version from the drop box folder make sure to also copy the lwt_map_icons. I am no longer using websites for the icons in case they go down again and instead I'm using icons from these folders. In order to have the balloons with the letters you need to have the icon folders in the same location as the kml file. If you don't have this folder all the icons turn into boxes with an x in it. All the description data and colouring stays the same, you just don't have the cool looking balloons. 

Update on finding data gaps during conjunctions: 

Now that the KML files are back in working order I have more time to spend with this. 

Talk to you all soon