Good Morning 

Payloads up: 

SANAE IV: 1J, 1K, 1M, 1N, 1O

Halley 6: 1D, 1I

Payloads ready for flight:

SANAE IV: Unlikely to have a launch until either late in the weekend or early next week

Halley 6: Expecting bad weather and no new launches until Monday at the earliest

Payloads below altitude:

1M dropped quickly and is now at around 25 km alt. We will be cutting it down at some point soon, 

Conjunctions: 

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 

Jan 11 2013

None

Jan 12 2013

Space Weather from Spaceweather.com

Solar wind speed is 327.6 km/s

Solar proton density 4.5 cm^(-3)

145 sunspots are now visible. NOAA has upped the likelihood of a M class flare to 50% and a 5% chance of an X class flare. The Evil Twins are slowly making their way around. There was an M class flare earlier, not sure if it was the evil twins but it potentially caused some radio trouble. I'm not sure if it was the twins and kind of doubt that it was geo-effective as the prediction for storms is still around 10%. 

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

Bz = 0.3 nT north

Btotal = 3.8 nT 

There are no large coronal holes on the sun

From Kyoto:

AE: There is extended activity (albeit <500 nT) starting today right before 1000 UT and continuing till after 1400 UT. 

Dst: If we define a storm as something that has a min. Dst < 10 nT... then we've seen something but really no. Nothing, it's really really quiet. 

Update on KML files: 

I've added a new feature. The balloons turn red when they are below altitude! I've updated 1B and 1D and am in the process of updating 1M. 

Update on events:

We're starting to try to have a science discussion on the blog, please feel free to comment, submit data. If you want to submit data/plots to the blog just e-mail me, but make sure to state that it's okay to post, otherwise I'll error on side of caution and not post it. 

We saw two more really small events

1) 1D saw something at 0448 UT on Jan 11th 2013 (almost the same time as the one on the 9th)

2) I think just 1D again, but at 1212 UT when there was quiet a lot of activity in the AE index. Warren has provided the spectrum data for us. 

Talk to you all soon