It starts tonight! If you can watch it, do so! We had been planning on driving up to the north a little bit, perhaps into the mountains, to see what we could see. I even marked my calendar for this event, too. Of course, there’s a gigantic cloud cover blanketing all of Alabama for all of tonight. Even though the chance of rain is only 30%, that cloud cover is predicted to hang around roughly til time for the sun to come up.
The kids have school tomorrow, but who cares? One of my first memories was being woken up in the wee hours of the morning to watch a lunar eclipse. Other important events my mom didn’t want me to miss, despite my inconvenient sleep schedule include the signing of the Camp David Accords and the wedding of Charles and Di, but those things really didn’t mean anything to me. They just annoyed me because they interfered with my sleep.
If you’re outside of the Alabama cloud cover, you might want to take advantage of this opportunity. The most active time is predicted to be around 5:30 CST, so hopefully some people actually will get to see it. We’re travelling through enough space debris that the predictions are for 30 meteors an hour in North America. Asia should get an even better show. Let me know if you see anything! I hate that we’ll miss it, but there’s still a chance that there will be some more activity tomorrow.
This pretty much speaks for itself, but I wanted to put it here because it absolutely made my day. I was watching NASA-TV with many others, holding my breath and hoping that the flight test of Ares 1-X would happen today. In case you missed it, or just want to bask in the glory of it, here:
The flight test took a lot of waiting on the weather to get going. It was confusing. NASA posted this explanation on their Test Flight Blog yesterday:
The skies look clear except for some high clouds, there’s no rain in the immediate forecast, so why might a rocket not launch? The answer is something called triboelectrification. While this isn’t a word you encounter every day, you might experience it if you walk across a dry carpet or brush up against a cat and then touch a metal surface: it’s static.
In the case of Ares I-X, flying through high-level clouds can generate “P-static” (P for precipitation), which can create a corona of static around the rocket that interferes with radio signals sent by or to the rocket. This would create problems when the rocket tries to transmit data down to the ground or if the Range Safety Officer at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station needed to send a signal to the flight termination system. Until the 45th Space Wing and observer aircraft indicate that the skies are clear, Ares I-X will wait them out.
And they did wait, and wait, and it felt so nervewracking to hear the frustration in people’s voices as they discussed yet another delay, or windows of opportunity for launch. But the end of the video, you can hear that it all worked out. “Let’s think about what we just did. Our first flight flight test, and the only thing we were waiting on, was weather.” It cuts off the next sentence, but I heard it, “That’s frikkin’ fantastic!”