For the Mission Monitors

Yesterday we had a mid campaign Science Meeting for our mission monitors. They are the BARREL army of undergrads who tirelessly watch over our payloads once they are launched. The rest of us also try to help out but have out hands full either on the ice launching the balloons, up here coordinating with the different satellite and science teams, or trying to get other science done. The mission monitors watch the payload, checking in every 30 minutes and letting us know if anything looks amiss. We really couldn't do the campaign without their help.

We had a talk from David Smith and myself, but then they also got both Brett and Robyn to call in! It really was a telecom from around the world.

Some highlights from the meeting. I made a movie (yes another one... I'll stop playing with iMovie but it's just so much fun and cool and easy!).

Also, Here's a photo of what the Halley station looks like. I don't have a photo of the SANAE station, but perhaps Brett will be able to send me one to post. 

It really was a great time and I hope the mission monitors enjoyed it as much as we did! 

Thanks again to our BARREL army of Mission Monitors! 

Thursday at AGU - reminder Data workshop

It has been a long week and although I've tweeted more than I ever have in my life, I haven't been able to blog like last year. I blame the slow internet and the battery life of my computer. However those are bad excuses.

As with every year AGU seems to be getting bigger and bigger and busier and busier. Sunday was of course Mini GEM which is always great and fun, but even that was busier. They scheduled meetings through lunch. They were great meetings and we were rewarded with ice cream and coffee, but I have expect that next year or soon we'll start having a two day session on Saturday and Sunday.

Monday was incredibly productive as we had our BARREL Burst Coordination meeting with the Van Allen teams as well as with Cube Sats and ground based researchers. We now feel ready and that we have a solid plan for this years campaign which could start within the next few weeks depending on ground based weather.

Tuesday of course was the day with most of the BARREL talks. It was fantastic to see all the types of research done with our data! Some of it has been presented before, but quiet a bit of it was new or extensions of those previous topics.

Yesterday was a few posters and there seemed to be quiet a bit of interest. I kept wanting to get to the oral sessions, but instead was caught up in the poster session talking with people and seeing some amazing research. As always there is too much great stuff to see at AGU and it's hard to get to everything one wants to see.

Today we again have a few posters and our summary talk. The talk should be a really great overview of all the current projects and the campaigns in general. It's at 9:30 am in Moscone West in session SA41C-07. We hope to see you there! Zan and Leslie will have posters in the afternoon session so make sure to find them. This afternoon we will also be holding a data workshop where you can come see our data and learn how to best view it. We'll be set up at one of the end tables in the poster session, hopefully close by to Zan and Leslie's posters.

Friday is the last day of AGU and a day to relax a bit. There aren't as many radiation belt talks scheduled, but instead I seem to have scheduled myself into a constant stream of side meetings. It will be another productive day. It's not often that so many of our collaborators can all get together, and although there are phone calls and e-mails, working side by side still seems to produce results in the most efficient way. Besides it is always nice to be able to sit and talk with our international collaborators. Phone calls to Europe are expensive and with the time delay e-mail conversations are long, not necessarily a bad thing as it gives you time to think, but not the fastest way to get research done.

Although AGU officially ends on Friday, there are other meetings going on this weekend in San Francisco. Saturday I think I might try to sit in on the THEMIS meeting. We are starting to get some great collaborations going with the THEMIS team so it would be good to catch up with them and see how their mission is going.

It has been a busy week and it's not even over yet. These conferences are a ton of fun and always a place where I come away feeling like I just too an intensive space physics course. I always seem to also have homework from these meetings...

Hope you all are having a great week too and if you are also at AGU hopefully we'll see you around!

Wed. at AGU.

We had some great talks yesterday and now today we start the posters! 

Xinging starts us off by looking at Microburst Precipitation. You can find him at poster SM33A-2147.  The session starts this afternoon at 1:40. 

We look forward to seeing you there and keep up with what we're seeing and doing at the meeting via Twitter. If you want to see what else is going on at AGU just follow the hash tag #AGU13. There are also live feeds running at the AGU website. Virtual participates can even ask questions. So if you ever wanted to see a science conference, here is your chance!  

Quick updates of what's going on in the next few weeks.

Things are busy here so just a few quick updates.

FIREBIRD had a successful launch late last night and all things are looking good. We are excited to be working with another student run cubesat mission! REPTILE was wonderful and is still going. These two cubesat missions together will add even more excitement to this years campaign. We have one great paper out from the REPTILE collaborations (with hopefully more to come) and we hope to have the same great outcomes with FIREBIRD.  Also as a teaser, I'm getting the launch video at AGU so we'll be able to post it here. Let me just say it is awesome and I can't wait to share it.

1) Mini GEM - This Sunday is Mini GEM and we hope to have another great showing of BARREL data throughout the day. I know I am working on putting together some stuff on mapping and substorms. It's very interesting if I say so myself... granted I might be a bit biased.

2) AGU - AGU will be very busy as always. We have almost everyone from the team presenting on BARREL data. We also have a few collaborators presenting on BARREL data and BARREL events. I'll try to put a list and schedule up here in the next few days. We will be participating in the Van Allen data workshops so if you haven't seen our data yet please feel free to stop by and have a chat!

3) People start heading down to the ice. Since everyone is flying this year many are also going to AGU. However they have to leave from San Francisco thus everyone is packing furiously and even those of us not traveling to the ice are trying to help out.

4) Mission monitors - We've already had a few training sessions for the mission monitors. They are  comprised mostly of undergrads and we are so thankful for their help! Throughout the campaign they take 3-hour periods where they look through the data almost constantly and fill out reports every 30 mins making sure that the payloads are at altitude, preforming properly, and if there are any problems, contacting the duty scientists so that we can fix them. It's a bit of a tedious job but a necessary one and we are so thankful for their help!

5) Dry run with Van Allen Probes. Dec. 17th we will be holding a dry run of a day in the life of BARERL. It's been a little less than a year since the campaign so we figured we needed a bit of practice before the real thing. We'll have a daily e-mail update, I'll make some fake plots, we'll gather the SW data and go through the motions.

6) The start of the mission! In the days leading up to the first launch I'll start the daily e-mails back up. If you are not on the e-mail list and should be, please let me know.


This is just the short list. We are hoping to have more outreach this year during the campaign. We're hoping to put together a google hangout! We've added a twitter account and of course we are on Facebook.

Happy Holidays and if you are going to AGU we'll see you soon!

Cluster meeting in Tromsø Norway

This week I have been in Tromsø Norway at the European Space Agency Cluster meeting. It has been fantastic and I am so glad they invited us to come and give a talk. I have learned so much from how to start planning a potential new spacecraft mission (well the very beginning of an idea about the planning of the mission) to magnetopause dynamics (the location where the solar wind from the sun collides with our magnetic field), to geotail dynamics (the part of our magnetosphere which goes from the night side of the Earth and away from the sun), to how to take a good photo of the aurora ( although a tripod is not mandatory, it sure helps). 

Due to the budget cuts at Most institutions across the US and at NASA, I am one of just a couple of Americans at this conference which is a bit strange as most of the conferences I attend have the majority of the attendees from the United states. I have been very lucky to attend and it has given me a chance to meet scientists from all over Europe. I hope that this will lead to more collaborations with my new friends as they are doing some great and very interesting work. I also hope that I was able to represent BARREL, the US, and US science projects well. 

Today in the afternoon we will have a field trip out to visit EISCAT an incoherent radar. It will be a nice break from talks and hopefully another great opportunity to discuss science and potential projects in an informal setting. We have a few potential leads for collaborations between Cluster and BARREL this coming northern hemisphere winter, but I would love to walk away from here with a solid idea for some collaborations. 

If you live in the auroral region, make sure to check out the nit sky we've. Been able to see some great aurora this week and tonight looks like it is going to be another great night to observe aurora!

Happy birthday Van Allen probes

Happy birthday to the Van Allen probes. They launched 1 year ago today. There was a great public lecture on the mission to date and we were very lucky to have been mentioned multiple times during the presentation. Check out our twitter feed on the right hand side to see what was discussed. 

Hopefully this is the first of many, well at least 4, birthdays for the mission. The satellite does have an end date as it will eventually run out of fuel, but that's a ways down the line. This first year has been incredibly successful and we are very excited to have been able to be apart of it. During the presentation it was pointed out that BARREL and the satellites were able to look at microburst and chorus waves. It is thought that the chorus waves are able to push the electrons farther down the field line and eventually they are lost through collisions with the neutral atmosphere. If the electrons didn't hit the atmosphere they would happily bounce along the field lines until their mirror points were moved either down the field line or they encounter the magnetopause and are lost back out into the solar wind. 

I am sure I have posted this before, but it's just so cool, chorus waves can be listened to as we do with other radio frequencies. Here is a link to some chorus waves, so named because they sound like the dawn chorus of birds, and these waves are often observed in the dawn sector.

http://www.wuft.org/news/2012/12/04/nasa-research/

Happy birthday Van Allen Probes 

IAGA 2013

Merida Mexico is beautiful! Since I either had the choice of getting into Merida at about midnight on Saturday or midnight on Sunday, the day before the conference, I chose to have a more relaxed conference and go on Saturday. 

It was perhaps the best decision. I was able to meet up with a bunch of collaborators and tour around town. 

Space physics was of course discussed, as its hard to not discuss something that we all love, and I found out that there might be another smaller balloon campaign going on in Canada at the same time as our campaign this coming winter! This means that we can try to coordinate and have them launch at the same time as we do. The really cool thing is that since they are also hand launching much smaller payloads and can drive to pretty much drive to any L-value and MLT value (magnetic location, associated with latitude and longitude). They need about a days notice, but that means that we could let them know where are balloons would be conjugate to and they could launch one at that location. 

If you may remember the earth has a magnetic filed which kind of looks like the magnetic field you can see using a bar magnet and iron fillings. 

http://scitechdaily.com/magnetic-cloak-hides-objects-from-static-magnetic-fields/

If you notice, a field line comes out of one side and goes on on the other side. With this other balloon mission we could potentially have our balloon at one end, their balloon at the other end, and potentially the Van Allen probes at a couple of locations along that field line. This would give us at least 4 points allowing us to see the differences one might find at either end point and see what in space may be causing this precipitation. 

We've also had now the first morning of sessions, and I am surprised at how much great science is being shown at such a relatively small conference. Since its a smaller conference people are getting a chance to talk for longer and also talk more in the coffee breaks. 

It is also great to see how many people from outside of the US are able to attend this meeting. It is sometimes hard for our international collaborators to join at all the meetings occurring in the States, and depending on where they are traveling from, conferences in Mexico, Asia, or Europe are some times much easier to get to and attend. This week will be a great opportunity to be able to catch up with them and perhaps start some strong international collaborations. 

Have a great day!

The Van Allen Science working group workshop in Van Allen Hall

The work shop is half over and I feel like I'm in the middle of a masters class on the radiation belts, how to manage an entire satellite mission, and how to think about budgetary/more business like issues. When I decided to become a physicist I never thought about the fact that I might have to be a manager, a low level accountant, writer, software engineer, teacher, travel agent ect. 

The week started with flying to the land of Van Allen (Iowa university). I think I touched ground in 5 states before landing in Iowa (the 6th state for the day).  All the flights were well worth it though! 

Even through I might not have been sure which airport I was in by the end of the day, I knew I must be in the right place as they had an exhibit of the history of flight and included early ballooning efforts.

The university is beautiful and the entire downtown area is filled with art. But you can't miss that Van Allen lived and worked here. Apparently some people got a cab ride and the driver had given rides to Van Allen and had some great stories about this amazing man.





The entrance to the hall has a very nice exhibit about all the research done in the physics lab, but also a good sized  exhibit on the explorer missions and the radiation belts.

All the sessions have been in the Van Allen Hall which seems very fitting. We've had some great discussions about the January 17th event (a big one for BARREL), the March 17th event, EMIC waves  (as we look towards the future), and of course planning for this next years campaign.





One thing that has surprised me as I've worked with the Van Allen teams is that they have been able to adapt the software on the satellite to make changes on the fly and improve compression rates as we see what's important and what's interesting so that we can gather more data. For example, last year during our campaign we started running into the problem of possibly overwriting interesting data. They have a set amount of storage space up on the satellite and it can take a lot of time to send the data back to Earth, so once that storage space has been completely full, it starts overwriting the oldest data. This year though there are plans to send up a new command to the satellite which would allow us to say "Keep this bit of data it's important" and then if we use up all the storage space we can protect the interesting stuff and make sure it doesn't get overwritten.

We have been working very hard, but we have gotten a chance to have a bit of fun. Craig, the PI of the EMFISIS team, and his wife were kind enough to invite us all to their home for nibbles and drinks. Of course the table ornament was a Lego version of one of the Van Allen Probes.



One of the reasons I love this field is that there are great and kind people in it. These "out of the office" get together are always so incredibly useful. When I was a younger student It was great to see that these big names in the field were just like anyone else. It also gave an opportunity to approach and talk with them in a more relaxed setting. It's amazing how many collaborations and funding opportunities come out of the after workshop dinners. It's also interesting to see how much easier it is to think in a more relaxed setting. I've seem the start to a good number of projects come from doodles on napkins. This is something that you can only get at in-person meetings and one of the reasons that they are just so important. Skype or Google hangouts, well very useful, just don't allow for the luxury of walking away, grabbing a cup of coffee, and then catching back up for dinner where the conversation easily goes from "hows life", to "what did you think about so-and-so's presentation", to "hey we could easily answer this with your code and my data". Before you know it you have a whole new project and some interesting answers to share with the field.

This has been a great meeting thus far and I can't wait to see what I'm going to learn today, and who I'm going to meet to collaborate with!

Long time no posts, What's coming up.

Sorry for the radio (or internet) silence. After GEM I was a bit sick and then went out west. I got to visit with Michael who builds all of our spectrometers.  I got to see  how they are built, tested, and put together.  I unfortunately don't have photos of those, but the campus at University of Washington is beautiful! They also have a good sized space physics department.  I'll have to make sure to stop by there more often when I'm on the West Coast. We got to talk a lot of science which is always fun and exciting. 

Granted I also went whale watching. One can't work all the time. 

But now it's back to the grind stone and I've been catching back up for the last few weeks and preparing for this next fall. It's going to be a busy one. 

First up; next week a few of us will be going to the Van Allen Science Working group meeting in Iowa. We'll be having a Van Allen conference in the Van Allen Hall. 

Van Allen was an amazing man. He and his grad students were the first to discover the radiation belts around the Earth. The data collected by the Australians and gathered by Sputnik could have been the first, but since they were on two different sides of the cold war, the data wasn't processed until after Explorer 1 had already launched and confirmed the existence of the inner radiation belt. As you may have guessed the Van Allen Probes were named in honour of him and are now the latest Satellite mission focused on studying and understanding the radiation belts. 

Science telecoms are starting back up!

This Monday we will be starting our bi-weekly telecoms back up. This coming week Jan will be presenting on some of his modeling efforts to look at January 17th. It should be a great discussion. If you are not on the BARREL e-mail list and would like to be, please contact either Robyn or myself.

As a random bit of science, Jan before coming to Dartmouth modelled the magnetosphere of Mercury. Here is a picture of him looking very thoughtfully towards the sun in his simulation with Prof. Robert Rankin.

And because movies are always fun. Here is a movie of the their simulation. 

Have a great weekend

The next BARREL/EFW telecom

Hi all,

I hope everyone has recovered from the last few meetings! Both GEM and our workshop with the EFW  were highly successful and very busy. Now having had a week to relax a bit I feel ready to get back to the grind of writing papers and doing research.

We will be starting our weekly telecoms back up on July 8th. The EFW telecoms will be starting back up the week before. If there are any volunteers to give a brief science talk or summary of what they did at or thought about the workshop or GEM let us know and we will add you to the speaker list. 

 

 

  

Shout out in todays tutorial

This morning we again had two great tutorials one by Lynn Kistler on oxygen in the magnetosphere, and the other by Xinlin Li on the Colorado cube Sat mission. Xinlin gave BARREL a great shout out. A few of his students have been working closely with us looking at conjunctions between our balloons and their satellite.


They have had perhaps the most successful cubesat mission to date. In fact their satellite after having gone silent and thought to have ended back in March has just started sending data back down again. It really is the little mission that could. Hopefully it will have an amazingly long life and we will get even more conjunctions this next campaign. It is a long shot and we were incredibly lucky to have such great coverage this last year, but why not shoot for the Moon (or at least the radiation belts).


Good luck little REPTILE and we are excited about continuing our successful collaborations with you!

The first GEM poster session

We have had many great sessions so far and the week is only half way through. Last night was the first of two poster sessions and it was really cool to see how many students were looking at BARREL events.

Zan (from Dartmouth College) presented on EMIC waves and their ability to precipitate radiation belt electrons. She showed work from her upcoming paper as well as a bit on the Jan 17th event.  

Lauren (from LASP at CU Boulder) is part of a Cube Sat project which is able to look at relativistic precipitation. Lauren has been looking at conjunctions between REPTILE and BARREL when we both observe relativistic precipitation. 

Thiago (From Dartmouth College) is a modeler who has been looking at the 17th event. He will soon be graduating and will be moving out to LASP for his post doc, however we hope that he will continue to work with us on BARREL data!

Jan is a postdoc at Dartmouth who along with Thiago is looking at the Jan 17th event. We have some great results from this modeling effort and our data!

Sapna (Dartmouth College) is looking at POES data with our events. This should give some great results with collaborations not just with the Van Allen Probes, but also with REPTILE. 

And this is Robert from UNH who works with Cluster data. He hasn't yet started to work with BARREL as Cluster was in eclipse for most of our 2013 campaign, but this next year we have high hopes for collaborations between our two missions! 

On our way to GEM

Got into Denver after a very early morning (4:30 am) and now heading on up the mountain and it looks a bit stormy.

The BARREL Grad students are all ready there and enjoying the day of tutorials. This afternoon Brett is giving the tutorial on the Van Allen probes. Leslie and I saw a preview of the talk and it was great, so try not to miss it!

I hope everyone has a safe trip up to Snowmass and we will see you soon.

Last day of the workshop

Hi all,

Today is the last day of our workshop. It has been really great; lots of discussion, lots of plans made for future research, lots and lots of learning how to run workshop groups greater than 10 people. It was a great surprise to see how many people were interested not just in our data but also in working with us and collaborating on a few events.

Today is technically a half day, but there are rooms free in the afternoon for more break out meetings and most of the BARREL team will be around to have more focused discussions on individual events. Come find us if you are interested.


Safe travels and thanks to all who came!

Happy second day of the EFW/BARREL workshop

Happy second day of the workshop. We had a great and productive day yesterday. I think we had some great discussions about the Jan 17th storm and other possible time periods to look at for EMCI waves and relativistic precipitation. Hopefully today will be just as productive! 

Today is a great day for a workshop as it's rainy and cloudy out side. We have plenty of coffee, or at least coffee near by, projectors in many of these rooms, and blackboards. Everything we need to really start getting some great work done.  

We're starting out today with some great overview talks. After the review talks, we'll have our break out sessions like yesterday. It seems that our chaos to order model of organising the workshop is working incredibly well. 

Today I will be in the meeting discussing the Jan 26th event (the storm that had it all) as well as the Feb. 2nd events. According to the black board it looks like we'll have our poster session, a session on the the plasmasphere and a session on the radars. I believe there are still a couple of rooms free for others to meet if interested in other events/topics. 

Good Morning: Workshop day 1

Hi all,

It's great to see you all at the workshop, and if you are not here we're missing you. The schedule for the workshop is slowly coming together. Today, for me at least, is going to be a good day because I get to talk about my favourite type of waves, ElectroMagnetic Ion Cyclotron waves (EMIC) waves. I also get the chance to work with my undergraduate advisor Mark Engebretson which is always a treat. Anyone at the meeting is always welcome to join us.

Right after the short talk part of the day we will be showing how to access our data and how to plot it. If you can't make it to this session there are quiet a few of us around that can help out throughout the workshop. I'll try to put up updates as we go along.

Have a great day.

3 sleeps until the workshop!

The workshop is fast approaching, it's only 2 days away (or there a bouts). I hope you all have your 2- 3 slides ready to state what you are hoping to work on this coming week, possibly a poster to share, your registration money (check or cash no credit/debit cards; you will get a receipt for reimbursement), and any data/plots you are hoping to work with once you are there.

We are currently finishing up getting our data ready. If you haven't already checked out our wiki and you need our data for the workshop please do so. You can find all the relevant information there for our pre-release versions of the data. I will also hopefully have a copy of all of our data so that if you need a day or two's cdf files I can get them to you easily without having to depend on the internet connection.

According to John's e-mail there will be snacks starting at 8:30 each day so that people can leisurely start meeting before the brief morning talks. Tuesday and Wednesday the meeting will run from 9:00am - 5:00pm and Thursday from 9:00am -12:00pm (but rooms will be available for people to leave late).  John's e-mail also sent out a lot of topics that people have expressed interest in. If you are not already on the EFW and or BARREL list and would like to be, please contact me to be added.

BARREL has selected three time periods to really focus on (but we're more than happy to work on others as well) Jan 17th, Jan 26th, and Feb 2nd. We've put them in a special folder on the wiki. I've started a schedule for myself on the wiki for next week, but others should feel free to add their own meetings to it as well. Also feel free to contact me or the others on the list about joining our discussions. The more the merrier!


I hope to see you all there and safe travels!

BARREL/Van Allen Workshop in June

In case you haven't heard and would like to attend, we are having our BARREL/Van Allen Science working group workshop June 4 - 6th in Minneapolis MN. It should be a blast. We will be focusing on three days Jan 17th, Jan 26th, and Feb. 2nd. There were quiet a few good events and interesting times to look at so it should be an exciting conversation!

This Monday's telecon will again have a science talk as well as a discussion about the format of the workshop. Please feel free to join us!


Hope to see you all there.

Reflections on Becoming the Science Communicator. Part three (and the scariest) Video

The EPSCoR Becoming the Messenger workshop was really incredibly useful and insightful! I only wish I had more time to work through all the topics we discussed. It was a whirl wind experience and one I hope to not forget anytime soon. Here without final ado is...


The final reflection. - video.


The video section was perhaps the most useful and the most embarrassing. It's amazing today how easy it is to make a video. If you've been following our blog you've seen a few of my attempts already. However at the meeting we got some great tips on how to make them look much more professional... with only the use of a phone or flip cam. Once again the layout was the same. Have a strong message with three pillars to really hold it up. Once you've got your message and structure you also need a call to action and of course some visual support. I found it interesting how this call to action was really related to letting your audience in, making them feel that they have a stake in this to and can do something about it.

All of these public out reach forums are things that as a scientist one never thinks they are going to do. One does not go into science to start a blog or become a celebrity and talk with news outlets, but it is something that I'm finding is really important. We become scientist, for the most part, because we love to figure things out and want to understand the world around us. But it is so important for us to also be able to show and communicate our results to the larger community. I suppose that means that at least to a certain degree I better get use to hearing my own voice or seeing myself in a video.

In the task given to us we were asked to film our message in three shots, an opening statement in a wide shot, our three main points in a tight shot, and then our closing statement in a wide shot. As you can see we didn't quiet make that.

The opening statement was suppose to pull the audience in. Thus my attempt at a funny story about how space weather gave me a snow day in school for at least one class. And that's where I then started to realise I was running out of time (we had less than 2 mins to talk). The next section was suppose to really convey concisely (not a strong point for me) what we wanted people to take away from the video. And in the closing statement, instead of rushing to a result, one is suppose to restate your message and "galvanise" your audience.

Here is my attempt. (If you notice I also took the time to add some "B-roll" of the flights of our payloads.)

And because I made you all sit and listen to me, here is a wonderful lecture  about some early astrophysics ballooning by perhaps the best physics educator ever Prof. Walter Lewin. Thank you stratocat for pointing me to this clip.