Hi folks,

I'm part of NASA's first Solar Flare Sounding Rocket Campaign.  We'll be launching 2 rockets (HI-C Flare and FOXSI 4) from Poker Flat Alaska sometime in the next few weeks. Our launch window is Apr 5-18, and the plan is to sit on the launch pad waiting for a solar flare to start. Once we confirm that something's going on, we launch into it and hope that it's a big one!

We've got some cool code that analyzes GOES data and does "now-casting". It monitors XRS levels and plays a sound alert when there's a flare starting.

https://github.com/pet00184/flarepred

 

While this was developed specifically for the rocket launch, I figured you all might have fun playing around with it as well.

Awesome

Hopefully old Region 3516 3615 comes back around with something. I'm probably not going to be the only one to wonder, will it be live streamed?

Edited April 2, 20241 yr by Jesterface23

I think @Jesterface23 typed that incorrectly if im not mistaken. 3615?   But no biggie. I am curious if poker flats is near the old HAARP facility in Alaska. If you know of it.  At one time supposedly they tried creating aurora at approximately 100 km with a huge array of circularly polarised antennas. 

Edited April 2, 20241 yr by hamateur 1953
HAARP

13 minutes ago, hamateur 1953 said:

typed that incorrectly if im not mistaken. 3615?

Spellcheck doesn't work until submit is entered.

It doesn’t care about our numbers anyway.  Hahaha 

1 hour ago, Jesterface23 said:

Spellcheck doesn't work until submit is entered.

 

Anyway the high altitude aurora research project as it was called many years ago was misunderstood by many people unfortunately.  And even thought by some to be weather control attempts!  🙄 however evidently they were supposedly successful in producing some local auroral displays.  Pretty cool imho.   Im incorrect in memory. It was/ is. High frequency active auroral research program. https://haarp.gi.alaska.edu/

Edited April 3, 20241 yr by hamateur 1953
Errors mine

52 minutes ago, hamateur 1953 said:

It doesn’t care about our numbers anyway.  Hahaha 

 

Anyway the high altitude aurora research project as it was called many years ago was misunderstood by many people unfortunately.  And even thought by some to be weather control attempts even 🙄 however evidently they were supposedly successful in producing some local auroral displays.  Pretty cool imho.   Im incorrect in memory. It was/ is. High frequency active auroral research program. https://haarp.gi.alaska.edu/

@hamateur 1953 Vey interesting article they can excite an area of the ionosphere and monitor/analyse the results. Thanks for the link 😊

I know. I was stunned when I heard of this some twenty or so years ago!  Good to see they turned over the project to someone.  Edit.   We need the guys and gals involved in HAARP to work on lower latitudes now…😝

Edited April 3, 20241 yr by hamateur 1953
Silliness

@DanicaShardae201
How long does it take from alert to launch?
 

I was wondering the same thing @helios 

46 minutes ago, helios said:

@DanicaShardae201
How long does it take from alert to launch?
 

 

1 hour ago, helios said:

@DanicaShardae201
How long does it take from alert to launch?

56 minutes ago, hamateur 1953 said:

I was wondering the same thing @helios 

This flowchart from the GitHub repo seems to indicate that there's a window of 7 minutes between the detection of flare start and launch, within which it's checked whether the flare has already ended in that time or not.

@Philalethes@hamateur 1953@helios @Jesterface23

I think the plan is to count down from t-15 minutes to t-3 minutes and then hold. Then once we see a flare triggering and decide to launch (maybe a minute or two of waiting) we'll give the go-ahead and start up the countdown from t-3 minutes. Then it takes another ~90 seconds to get above the atmosphere and start observing.
We've also got a second rocket that will be launching a minute or two after the first (from a different team).  The reason they're not launching simultaneously is we don't have the personnel or bandwidth to monitor two simultaneous launches.
We're hoping to co-observe with Hinode, IRIS, and Solar Orbiter.

I don't know if there's an option for a livestream, but I'm looking into it.

 

 

For more information on the rockets, check out

Hi-C Flare's website:   https://hic.msfc.nasa.gov/

FOXSI-4 website: https://foxsi.umn.edu/launches/foxsi-4

 

Edited April 3, 20241 yr by DanicaShardae201

Really cool, thank you! I will play around with the code this weekend.

I love when things like this is shared as open source. I hope the project will be a success!

for anyone who is interested in the flare prediction software, they put out a small update. It's been cleaned up a bit to only reflect the data we're actually going to be using during our observation window.  I'm still working on getting a livestream of mission control and/or the launch rail. If I can manage that, I might set up a way to ping a bunch of people if there's action happening.

https://github.com/pet00184/flarepred

45 minutes ago, DanicaShardae201 said:

for anyone who is interested in the flare prediction software, they put out a small update. It's been cleaned up a bit to only reflect the data we're actually going to be using during our observation window.  I'm still working on getting a livestream of mission control and/or the launch rail. If I can manage that, I might set up a way to ping a bunch of people if there's action happening.

https://github.com/pet00184/flarepred

Cool. Thank you!  Good luck with your window of opportunity @DanicaShardae201  Mike