Two new BARREL papers just in time for some summer reading.

Looking for something to read for this summer? Well we have something for you. Within the last month we've had two new BARREL papers published.

Lauren Blum et al published another GRL on the January 18 & 19 2013 relativistic electron events. It's a great new look at EMIC waves and when they may be responsible for relativistic electron precipitation.

The second paper is one that we've been working on for a long time. It's on two event time periods, one on the 3rd and the other on the 6th of January 2014. For each event we had some fantastic conjunctions between the array of BARREL balloons and the two Van Allen Probes. We were able to show that the plasmapsheric hiss, and then the precipitation where the hiss was resonant with radiation belt particles, was coherent across large regions of the plasmasphere.

Okay so perhaps this isn't really the light summer reading that you were hoping for, but we hope you enjoy them any way!

The Nature journal where our paper is published.

New Publications out!

Long time no post.

The third campaign is really heating up! We hope to have an exciting set of new collaborations just by virtu of launching in a new location, ESRANGE in Kiruna Sweden. (Congrats Sweden on the Eurovision win!)

However, we've also just had a set of papers all come out over the last six months that should be highlighted. 

There's the paper by our grad student Zan Li et al looking at one of the many REP events captured by BARREL. 

The next was a paper by Halford et al showing a look at an event where BARREL saw portions of an entire solar storm process resulting in precipitation from the radiation belts. 

And finally we had our summer paper published. Woodger et al summarized the first two BARREL campaigns and show an example of how take our X-ray measurements and compare them to precipitating electron populations. 

All of the BARREL papers can be found in the recent publications page. If you notice that we're missing one, let us know and we'll add it. 

There are many more papers on the way so keep a look out and we'll keep you posted. Remember to also follow us on twitter at @KeV_balloons for the latest updates. 

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!

New paper with BARREL

A new paper using BARREL data is out and is open access! This last campaign we had some great conjunctions with the Colorado Student Space Weather Experiment's cube sat.  Some great science has come out of this collaboration and is now in a Geophysical Research Letters (GRL) in the Van Allen Probe's special issue.

New conjunctive CubeSat and balloon measurements to quantify rapid energetic electron precipitation by Blum et al GRL 2013 

It was wonderful to collaborate with Lauren and the rest of the cubeSat team. I hope this is just the first of many such collaborations. We have a few others that have been submitted and are in the process of being submitted. As they come out we'll make sure to keep everyone up to date. 

Congrats Lauren et al on a great paper! 

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!

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. 

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!

Robyn's Physics Colloquium video

As promised, here is Robyn's physics colloquium talk! It really was fun to see our entire campaign summarised with a great introduction. If you've ever wondered what it is we do exactly or what space physics even is, this has some great info at the beginning. 

Colloquium Abstract - April 19, 2013

Robyn Millan, Dartmouth College

Topic: "Dynamics of Radiation Belt Electrons and the BARREL Experiment"

Abstract: The intensity of relativistic electrons in Earth's radiation belts is known to be highly variable, but the processes responsible for this variability are still not well understood. Observed rapid depletions and subsequent rebuilding of the trapped particle population imply an efficient energization process, in some cases accelerating electrons to multiple MeV energies on a timescale as short as minutes. NASA's two Van Allen Probes were launched in August 2012 to study the radiation belts. BARREL is a multiple-balloon investigation that works with the Van Allen Probes to study atmospheric loss of radiation belt electrons. The first BARREL balloon campaign was carried out in January-February 2013. Twenty small (~20 kg) balloon payloads were launched from the SANAE IV and Halley VI Antarctic research stations. A second campaign will be carried out next year. This talk will provide an introduction to radiation belt physics, and will summarize early results from BARREL and Van Allen.

I'll see if we can get the actual video to upload here, but in the mean time, just click on the link.

Dartmouth Physics Colloquium: BARREL edition

Today Robyn gave the Physics Colloquium at Dartmouth College. Brett provided and set up all the show and tell portions of the talk. It made an impressive display. We had a buttoned up payload (the white box), the insides and just the frame along with the parachute and a ripped balloon from this last years campaign. Once the link to the video is up we'll make sure to let everyone know. 

I thought it was cool how you could see the payload here and then in the photo, but that didn't turn out too well, so I tried again

Our Icon with the entire payload. 

Some spectrograms which show those "Alien Birds" 

 Afterwards people came up and were able to feel just how thin and strong our balloons are. It's quiet amazing to think that they can go through these large temperature changes and carry our payloads all without breaking. The technology used is just so cool!

Barrel physics colloquium.

The physics colloquium is starting. Well have the video link in a few days.

New Page! Fun with Google Earth

Hi all,

 So if you have noticed we have a new page. We are in the process of getting our BARREL position files to run interactively from the blog. At the moment we have a first draft so go check it out and have a bit of fun with it! We're still re-processing some of the data so not all file names will have the "_L_MLT" portion of the file name. Those that do include the L-value and Magnetic local time (MLT) data with them while the others do not. I'm hoping that now that we have this working somewhat it won't take too much effort to add other satellite footprints and the lines of constant L.

If you have any suggestions on how to make this better let me know! We'll see if we can add in any suggested features. Currently on the list of things to add we have

• ground based magnetometer locations  Added! 
• option to show Van Allen Satellite southern hemispheric footprint Added! 
• show lines of constant L Added!
• our "colour bar" for MLT Added!
• Possibly include a view of the Satellite orbit with the balloon footprints at the magnetic equator. 
• choose a date and then what you want to plot (payloads, satellites, ect. )

Have fun with it!

Now you too can make your own plots of our payloads!

Space Physics at Dartmouth

Dartmouth Now just published a great article about Robyn and Mary and the work they are doing on the Van Allen Satellites and BARREL. It's a great synopsis of both missions and why they work so well together. There's also a great gallery of photos from both the Van Allen Satellites and BARREL.

News from Wilder

First Plasma Seminar at Dartmouth for Spring quarter

Today was our first plasma seminar at Dartmouth for the spring quarter and Robyn gave a great summary talk on the BARREL mission and 2013 Campaign. She'll be giving a similar talk at the physics colloquium later this month (I think). Our colloquiums are taped, so we'll put a link to it here once she has given it. In the mean time and as a bit of a teaser, here are some pictures from today's talk.

Our project overview

Our payload up close, and in the air!

Some pretty pictures (Which will hopefully be upload to the blog soon!)

Enjoy! 

The BARREL paper is now out in Space Science Reviews

Just thought I'd post an update. Our paper is now out on line in the space science reviews! It's a great paper and well worth a read... I may be biased but I'm going to go out on a limb and say it's possibly the best paper you'll read this year.

Enjoy,

Nerd Night in the East Bay

Just finishing mic check for tonight's nerd night talk in Oakland, CA should be lots of fun.

AGU Day 4

Second to last day of AGU and another busy one, at least for me. Lots of great talks on the radiation belts. Leslie did an amazing job stepping in to give Robyn's talk. Robyn left last night to fly to South Africa to catch the boat to the Antarctic.

I talked a bit with Chris Cully about BARREL conjunctions with Themis. Every one seems to be really excited about getting BARREL data and it's just an incredibly fun time!

Speaking of fun times. Although we didn't all meet up, quiet a few of us from the BARREL team made it to the Night at the Museum at the California Academy of the Sciences. We think this might have to become an annual AGU thing. It's amazing.

We'll hopefully have some better pictures soon, but these will have to do for now. They have the coolest jelly fish and sea dragons (?) as well as amazing extra activities at Night Life. This week they had a string quartet that played queen (Bohemian Rapacity and everyone tried to sing along) as well as a a few other classics including white rabbit and the pink panther.  It's well worth the $12.00 admission!

Tomorrow it' back to work before flying home. I hope everyone has had a productive an AGU!

Have a good night!

Day 1 of Fall 2012 AGU wrap up

Today was a great start. Warren did a great job at his poster. He's been working hard on getting our soc (The computer and website where anyone can find our data) up and running. Tomorrow is our Burst meeting with the Van Allen Probes Teams at the Thirsty Bear at either 4:00 or 5:00. As the start time is not set yet, I suggest getting there at 4:00 and then letting the rest of us know what is the best beer on tap there.

I hope you all are having a great AGU meeting as well!