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Right: The camera freezes snow in midair as an Andoya scientist prepares to launch a weather balloon that will tell if conditions aloft are safe to launch the rocket. More photos and current status reports are available at the Andoya Rocket Range. (All photos: Andoya Rocket Range) Scientists plan Arctic CAPER to study space weather "The weather [at the tracking station at Longyearbyen] has become challenging with high winds and fresh snow producing snow drifts that slowly snake across the valley like mute ghosts condemned to wander eternally," Dr. Paul Kintner of Cornell University, CAPER's principal investigator, wrote on Saturday. 
Left: An artist's concept depicts the
planned trajectory of CAPER from Andoya, Norway, to the polar
ice cap. Links to 984x768-pixel,
72K JPG. More photos and current status reports are available
at the Andoya Rocket Range.
(All photos: Andoya Rocket Range)
"Both of our 4-wheel drive vehicles were stuck in the snow during our trip to the station. One still remains stuck as the [launch] window closes.... Visibility is zero within a few meters of the ground and during the drive out to the Nordlysstajonen occasionally the road could only be seen by opening the car door and looking down." Although CAPER has been ready since Jan. 11, launch has been postponed each evening because the right science conditions were not available, or because of weather. The CAPER team is anxious to start the countdown and then launch over an aurora arc. Data from instruments on the ground and on the Polar satellite are used to determine when conditions are right. When CAPER finally takes off it will soar to an apex of about 1,400 km (828 mi) in its 25-minute flight. |
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"We're studying a region that is believed to provide the majority of the mass that makes up the magnetosphere," said Victoria Coffey, a scientist at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center. Coffey is the experiment scientist for two CAPER instruments, TECHS (the Thermal Electron Capped Hemisphere Spectrometer) and TICHS (the Thermal Ion Capped Hemisphere Spectrometer). An initial study was made by SCIFER - the Sounding of the Cleft Ion Fountain Energization Region - on Jan. 25, 1995. It showed that plasmas (electrified gases) are accelerated to energies of a few hundred electron volts in a few well-defined regions of the cleft or cusp. |
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Left: A keogram depicts auroral conditions over the Longyearbyen tracking station north of Andoya. Keograms take strip images of the aurora, as seen by all-sky cameras, and stack them side-by-side to depict changes over time (left to right). Keogram is derived from keoitt, old Eskimo for aurora. Links to 640x480-pixel, 101K GIF. "It's the only place where solar wind particles can directly enter Earth's ionosphere," Coffey explained. |
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Dooling |
Jan.
19, 1999: A NASA rocket is poised to
blast off from Norway to study space weather high above the Arctic circle.
CAPER, the Cleft Accelerated Plasma Experimental Rocket,
will carry one of the most complex instrument packages
ever launched into the region where the Earth's atmosphere
is directly exposed to space. The mission has been in development for more
than three years. Now scientists are waiting expectantly to send
CAPER aloft before the launch window closes on Jan. 25.
