In case you missed it

I just found today a wonderful article written by Karen Fox about BARREL. They also have a great slide show from the Halley station. You can also find their quick little article with a few more wonderful photos here.

Looking back on the success and fun photos from the 2013 campaign has me excited for the upcoming 2014 campaign. We're starting to ship payloads tomorrow down to SANAE IV and next week we plan to start shipping to Halley 6. Just a couple of more months before we start launching balloons! With that said there is still so much to do (write papers, give a few presentations at upcoming meetings, talk with collaborators ect. ) I should get back to work.

Enjoy the little articles and photos!

Mission Readiness Review

Today is an exciting day. Today we have gone though our Mission Readiness Review (MRR). During the MRR we go through how last years campaign worked, what might be changed in this upcoming campaign, and making sure that we have checked and rechecked everything.

Since we are launching from non-American stations we have to make sure that we are following the NASA safety guidelines. We also have to make sure that the people we are sending down have gone through all the safety for hand launching balloons. All of this was taken care of this past summer and of course prior to the last campaign. Safety is always important in the Lab and field, but even more so when you are in hard to get to places.

Now that the MRR has finished we can start shipping all of our payloads to their launched stations. This is when it all starts feeling real. Now we just have to make sure that we have all of us staying in the Northern Hemisphere are ready for our close collaborations with the Van Allen Satellite teams.

This coming campaign we hope to once again use the Blog to give updates and summaries of how the campaign is going. We have added (in case you haven't noticed) a twitter feed for BARREL. We hope to use the twitter feed to give even faster updates as to when each payload is launched or terminated. Of course we'll have the daily e-mails about the current space weather conditions and such for the science collaboration teams as well as our telecons. We hope to meet at AGU to discuss how to best run these sessions.

On the science side of things we have a number of GRLs that are hoping to be, or have already been, submitted to the special Van Allen issue. We'll post updates as they come up in the pre-print sections. A number of the team members will be at a workshop at UNH on EMIC waves, and then most of us will be at AGU. It will be an exciting few months leading up to the launch of our first payload for the new campaign!