Daily e-mail Jan 9th 2013

Good morning,

Payloads up as of 6:13 PST Jan 9th 2013: 

SANAE: 1J, 1K, 1M, 1N 

Halley Bay: 1B, 1D

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

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

Halley Bay: 1I is ready for launch and 1G is being tested. Weather expected to be clear and they may have a launch today before some more bad weather comes in. 

Payloads coming down:

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

Conjunctions: (A/B represents Satellite, next number is conjunction number, LP# is which "loop" the conjunction occurs on, see the attached figure)

Jan 8th 2013:

A9LP3 7:00 - 16:30 Drift Shell Conjunction 

B9LP3 7:00 - 16:60 Drift Shell Conjunction

Jan 9th 2013:

A10** 3:10 - 10:50 Halley (If there is a launch... or perhaps the ground station magnetometer?)

B9**   2:15 - 8:45 SANAE (If there is a launch this day)

Jan 10th 2013

A11 6:00 - 13:40 1J (1J may be on a higher L, but this would potentially be a conjunction at apogee.

B10** 5:05 - 12:40 Halley 

Space Weather from Spaceweather.com

Solar wind speed is 342.8 km/s

Solar proton density 4.2 cm^(-3)

144 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. Although 1640 has now moved past our line of sight, there is a new sunspot to watch. It is just coming around the eastern limb, so not geo-effective, but it is quiet large and may be orientated in such a fashion which can produce M class flares. Hopefully it will wait to flare until it has moved across the surface of the sun. 

Kp is quiet kp = 1 with a 24 max of kp = 2

Bz = 1.2 nT south

Btotal = 4.0 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 (again). 

From Kyoto:

AE: a small blip in the AE index at ~0900 UT Jan 9th 2013

Dst: incredibly quiet! 

Update on KML Files: 

The KML files are now up to date and I'm currently working on making the prediction files. I have also re-run the Van Allen Footprints for each individual day and these files contain their altitude. With so many days to look at, google earth keeps taking longer to load. I found that if I don't save the files in google earth, but open the ones I want up individually after launching google earth, the process is faster. 

Update on finding data gaps during conjunctions:

For a quick look, the GPS data in the KML files are minute averaged. If there is GPS data, there should be data for those time periods as well. I'm slowly getting the data from the ice as they are able to upload it, so some of the larger gaps will eventually be at least partially filled in. I'll work on putting together a table with times when the Antarctic teams were acting as the ground station. 

Talk to you all soon