Rocket_Report_4th_quarter_2019.pdf
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- NASA Sounding Rocket Operations Contract (NSROC) IV - FINAL Request for Proposal, eLibrary
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About this file
This document summarizes a federal agency's quarterly report on sounding rocket program activities. The report provides an overview of several sounding rocket missions conducted by the agency in the fourth quarter of 2019. Key details include the mission objectives, experiments, launch dates and locations for various payloads. These involved measuring properties of dust formation around stars, testing rocket components, studying stellar clusters, investigating irregularities in Earth's ionosphere, and identifying mechanisms influencing the thermosphere. Images show rocket launches and payloads as well as mission teams conducting pre-launch testing and post-launch data analysis. Contact information is provided for those interested in contributing to future reports. A schedule lists additional sounding rocket missions planned for early 2020 focusing on areas like the upper atmosphere, astrophysics and planetary defense.
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Sounding Rockets Program Office
National Aeronautics and Space Administration
What’s inside...
2 Features
3 Picture Place
6 Schedule & Miscellanea
The purpose of the Determining
Unknown yet Significant Traits
(DUST) experiment was to measure important variables in the end-to-end process of grain formation in circumstellar outflows around
AGB stars and model the physical and chemical properties of the dust. The scientific goal was to determine the most important physical properties controlling dust production and measure the infrared spectrum of the analog dust grains during formation and agglomeration in the laboratory and in microgravity. The DUST instrument included four double wavelength interferometers and two in-situ IR spectrometers.
36.343 Nuth team with rocket at White Sands Missile Range, NM.
36.343 Nuth - Determining Unknown yet Significant Traits
(DUST) launched October 7, 2019
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On the web at: http://sites.wff.nasa.gov/code810/2
46.020 GT Hesh SubTEC-8
launched on October 24, 2019
FORTIS team at White Sands Missile Range, NM.
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SubTEC-8 launches from Wallops Island, VA.
SubTEC-8 featured several experiments from NASA and NSROC, designed to test sounding rocket development components and subsystems. The mis-sion objectives included: (1) demon-strate distributed sub-payload to main payload telemetry communication, (2) provide an observation opportunity for a prototype star tracker (3) demonstrate a 40 Mbps telemetry encoder; and (4) provide a test flight opportunity for several sounding rocket development components and subsystems.
36.352 UG McCandliss/Johns
Hopkins University - Far-ultravio-let Off Rowland-circle Telescope for Imaging and Spectroscopy
(FORTIS) - Launched October 28, 2019 (UTC)
FORTIS is a multi-object spectro/tele-scope equipped with a next-generation microshutter array (NGMSA) capable of imaging individual stars within NGMSA slitlets while simultaneously obtaining their far-UV spectra. The primary science goal for this mission was to study mas-sive hot star clusters in the star-forming
Galaxy M33.
This mission measured the far-UV emission stratification of the hot stellar clusters that litter the disk of M33 by quantifying variations in the gas-to-dust ratio, and searching for suspected sources of unidentified emission hinted at by far-UV photometry from the Hubble
Space Telescope.
46.029 IE Moen/University of Oslo
- Investigation of Cusp Irregulari-ties (ICI) 5 - Launched November
26, 2019
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ICI-5 launches from Svalbard, Norway.
The Investigation of Cusp Irregularities
(ICI) 5 mission was part of the Grand
Challenge Initiative - Cusp, an international scientific data sharing partnership.
Andoya Space Center (ASC) was responsible for the overall management of the mission and provided the ICI-5 payload via the University of Oslo, while
NASA provided the launch vehicle.
The cusp is a source of local perturbations in the ionosphere and also a source of ionospheric disturbances that propagate all the way to mid and low latitudes. The ICI payload contained a 4D space module that was designed to deploy six daughter payloads. The main payload contained an instrumentation suite provided by a multinational science team that included researchers from
Norway, United States, and Canada.
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52.006 UE Conde/University of
Alaska - Cusp-Region Experiment
(C-REX) 2
36.349 UE Larsen/Clemson Uni-
versity - Cusp Heating Investiga-tion (CHI) - Launched December
10, 2019.
Science conditions did not cooperate for the C-REX 2 team this year. After 17 launch attempts, the team is returning home and the mission will be re-scheduled for a later date.
C-REX 2 is designed to identify mechanisms responsible for sustaining a region of neutral mass density at 400km altitude that appears to be a permanent feature of the Earth’s cusp-region thermosphere.
After waiting diligently for science conditions to be suitable, CHI was launched from Ny Alesund in Svalbard, Norway on December 10, 2019.
The purpose of the mission was to measure neutral upwelling and high-resolution electric fields over an extended region in the cusp. The measurement technique was eight non-ejecting barium/strontium canister releases distributed across the vehicle trajectory above 180 km altitude.
Satellite measurements show consistent evidence of small-scale field-aligned current structure in the region where the cusp neutral upwelling is found.
Numerical modeling studies indicate that Joule heating, produced by the small-scale electric field fluctuations associated with this type of structure, appears to be the most likely driver for the upwelling. So far, a sufficiently comprehensive and detailed data set has not been available to test the model predictions.
CHI was designed to allow both plasma drift measurements, obtained from barium clouds that ionize in sunlight, and neutral wind measurements from strontium clouds that remain neutral.
Estimates of Joule heating, including the small-scale contributions, are achieved using a combination of the in-situ rocket measurements and groundbased radar data.
Initial reports indicate that all eight
Barium releases, and two of the
Strontium releases, occured as planned.
CHI launches from Ny Alesund, Svalbard.
CHI vapor trails.
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CHI mission team.
Image Credit: Allison Stancil-Ervin-Wallops Imaging Lab
C-REX 2 sequence testing at Andoya Space Center, Norway.
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On the web at: http://sites.wff.nasa.gov/code810/4
2019 in Pictures
5On the web at: http://sites.wff.nasa.gov/code810/
On the web at: http://sites.wff.nasa.gov/code810/6
Want to contribute?
Working on something interesting, or have an idea for a story? Please let us know, we’d love to put it in print!
Contact:
Chuck Brodell Phone: #1827 Email: Charles.L.Brodell@nasa.gov or
Berit Bland Phone: #2246 Email: Berit.H.Bland@nasa.gov
WS - White Sands WI -Wallops Island NOR - Andoya, Norway FB - Fairbanks Kwaj - Kwajalein, Marshall Islands SVAL - Svalbard, Norway
Launch Schedule January - March 2020
33.062 UE team at White Sands Missile Range, NM in 1993.
MISSION DISCIPLINE EXPERIMENTER INSTITUTION PROJECT RANGE DATE
36.356 UE GEOSPACE SCIENCES BAILEY VA TECH PolarNOx FB 01/26/20
36.281 UG UV/OPTICAL ASTROPHYSICS ZEMCOV RIT CIBER-2 WS 02/24/20
36.355 UH HIGH ENERGY ASTROPHYSICS FIGUEROA NORTHWESTERN Micro-X WS 03/15/20
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