Because half of our equipment was “indisposed” as of morning, we canceled launches for the day and instead headed out to rescue the “tree’d” AirCores. One great thing about doing launches around here is that it’s almost guaranteed that someone at the SGP ARM lab will know the land owner of the place where our AirCore has landed. Or at least someone will know someone who knows a guy who can get us the owner’s phone number. In this case, Rod Soper, one of our SGP hosts, is a friend of the owner (in fact they used to be housemates in their younger days!) and gave him a call. The owner said he had no problem with us going on his land and sawing down some tree limbs or even cutting down a tree, if needed.
AirCore-eating trees
So off we went with James, Scott and Rod. Our tools included a ladder, the newly acquired 16’ extendable pruning saw, an extendable pool cleaning handle modified with a hook made of a piece of bent conduit (courtesy of Chris Martin at the lab), and tick repellent. The closest piece of the flight string, the parachute, was about 20 feet overhead, so we started off sawing away a couple branches until the parachute dropped enough to hook it with the pool cleaning handle. Then puuullllllled gently to avoid snapping the lines or breaking anything and soon we had the parachute, Iridium box and Garmin dog tracker in hand. And then SNAP! One of the connector hooks gave way. Rats. But a bit more sawing and then the ADS-B transponder box was within reach. More gentle puuullllling and then we had the iMet, followed shortly by the AirCores dragging and dropping their way through the lower branches. Success!
First, a couple of tree branches sawed out of the way….
The parachute is hooked!
And here comes the Iridium box!
iMet approaching!
Two AirCores in the hand are worth….. well, a lot more than two AirCores in the treetops.
After a few hoots we loaded everything into the vehicles and headed back to the lab to measure the AirCores, detangle lines, replace some connectors, and charge batteries for tomorrow’s launches.
Since we were done by mid-afternoon, we decided to go visit our TCCON partners – Harrison Parker from CalTech and Liz Cunningham from the University of Toronto. They showed us the TCCON and the portable EM-27s. We’ll be comparing our AirCore data to the data from these instruments. Too bad we weren’t able to launch today because the mostly clear skies were perfect for their measurements!
Building that houses the Total Column CO2 Observing Network instrument
The TCCON instrument
Liz and Harrison with their EM-27s
