BARREL Status Report #6
August 9, 2016
The upper level wind speeds are still too high so we are definitely not launching tomorrow. The good news is that the predictions show the speeds starting to come down in the next few days. It looks like we are starting to enter turnaround! At this point, we are planning for a Saturday evening launch in order to catch the Van Allen Probes conjunction on Sunday morning. The weather looks marginal at this point but we’ll keep looking at it. Today we finished the CPT for payload 2G and balanced the payload with its flight train. We also got payload 1Z checked out and plan to button it up and do its CPT tomorrow. Tomorrow we should have some dry weather so will have an opportunity to do a launch dry run with Esrange personnel.
Robyn,
And now some of the first photos from the team in ESRANGE! Photos are always exciting :)
Testing systems/communications. We have to take the payloads outside in order to have them connect with the iridium satellites and to make sure there is no interference with the ESRANGE systems. Better to find out now on the ground if they are having trouble instead of when we fly them. But all systems are good to go. Now just hoping for good ground weather, slow stratospheric winds, and some interesting space weather to view!
This is from the hang test. We want to make sure the payload weight distribution is balanced so its more stable which provides more stability when flying, a hopefully more controlled decent and thus softer landing, and everything should be sitting up nice a straight in the box. Looks pretty straight to me :)
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