LUNAR’clips 2003                        Volume 10, Number 3

Copyright © 2003 by LUNAR, All rights reserved.

Free-Flying Magnetometers and Sounding Rockets...

In the March/April issue of LUNAR'clips and there was an article reprinted from the NASA website on the NASA ST5 nanosat project. While ST5 will be the first real nanosat mission for NASA, the idea of dispensing free-flying magnetometers frisbee-style from a science payload has been done recently by a colleague of mine while she was at the University of New Hampshire.

Dr. Kristina Lynch (now at Dartmouth College) was the Principal Investigator on the Enstrophy sounding rocket campaign ( http://esp.sr.unh.edu/rockets/enstrophy.html). This mission, was launched from the Poker Flat Research Range near Fairbanks, AK in early 1999. It was nicknamed ``Pucks in Space'' and was the proof-of-concept flight for the JPL free-flying-magnetometer (FFMs) system. The goal of the flight was to measure the magnetic field at several locations in space and derive a rough distribution of electric current from those measurements, as well as to discriminate between temporal fluctuations of the magnetic field and spatial variations shifted up some frequency by the motion of the rocket through space (tones vs. ruts in the road, so to speak).

NASA still supports a variety of sounding rocket launches, from small meteorological rockets that go up tens of km altitude, to larger, longer range versions that go to hundreds of km altitude (around 1400 km max so far). These launches support a variety of studies of the Earth's neutral atmosphere, ionosphere, auroral activity, as well as lofting astrophysical payloads to high altitudes for both stellar and planetary observations.

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