{"id":48,"date":"2015-08-07T07:05:31","date_gmt":"2015-08-07T07:05:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ciresblogs.colorado.edu\/erasmus\/?p=48"},"modified":"2015-08-07T07:05:31","modified_gmt":"2015-08-07T07:05:31","slug":"foiled","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ciresblogs.colorado.edu\/erasmus\/2015\/08\/07\/foiled\/","title":{"rendered":"Foiled…"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/strong>The reality of field work is sometimes an ugly one.\u00a0 In an ideal world, you show up to your site, the weather\u2019s good, your instruments and tools work, and you get a fantastic dataset.\u00a0 That, through preparation of your team and your equipment (and usually by a little bit of luck on the weather side) is what you hope for, but you do your best to plan for anything else that may come up.\u00a0 For this campaign, we prepared our equipment as had been done for previous successful campaigns, made sure that we had more than enough stuff with us, shipped everything a few days earlier than required, and even (so far) got lucky with good weather.\u00a0 But as I alluded to in the previous post, getting the aircraft flying as they should has been challenging, and Dale, Nathan, Will and I have spent the last three days troubleshooting, fixing, and learning about the situation — in the process we’ve launched and recovered 53 airplanes!<\/p>\n

\"A<\/a>

A map showing all of the flights (53 (!) in total) completed over the last three days in order to try to troubleshoot the aircraft issues we have been having.<\/p><\/div>\n

At this point, it has become increasingly likely that what we are being impacted by something beyond our control.\u00a0 As crazy as it sounds, with a bunch of testing, it is becoming more and more likely that the cause behind all of our troubles is interference from the USAF radar facility.\u00a0 What makes this all the more challenging is that we know very little about this radar (we asked for details but were told we don\u2019t have the correct clearances to obtain that information), and we can\u2019t turn it off to test to see whether our theory is true (we know better than to ask them to turn it off for a while!). \u00a0Fortunately, we’ve been able to gain a small amount of knowledge through the internet (thanks Wikipedia!). \u00a0In the end, what this means for us is that nearly every time our aircraft is flying somewhere between 30 and 100 meters for any extended period of time, our autopilot is being impacted to the point where it nearly cripples the plane.\u00a0 This was confirmed yesterday\u00a0afternoon through a series of test flights where we used a remote control handset to hand fly the plane at a series of altitudes.\u00a0 The frequency with which our autopilot was impacted upon reaching ~50 meters was astonishing.<\/p>\n

\"The<\/a>

The DataHawk being launched in front of the radar facility that appears to be giving us a whole load of trouble.<\/p><\/div>\n

So how do we fix it?\u00a0 Well, we\u2019re still working on this, but the first idea was to shield the sensitive equipment from the radar\u2019s impact and change our flight plans to avoid this area of elevated exposure.\u00a0 The second part can be done easily, but will not guarantee success since the airplane will still need to pass through the 100 meter altitude in order to get above the radar beam.\u00a0 The shielding is substantially tougher, and we decided that our best chance was to wrap the payload bay with aluminum foil.\u00a0 We did so after dinner, performed some initial test flights and were disappointed to find that this did not seem to help at all.\u00a0 Next, Dale dissected the aircraft a bit further in order to add extra shielding to pretty much anything that could take it, but this again did not solve things.\u00a0 The nice thing about the extended daylight hours up here is that you could essentially troubleshoot things and continue test flying throughout the night, if necessary.\u00a0 However, the unfortunate thing about those extended daylight hours is that you never have a natural stopping point and there is extreme temptation to continue working on things until you\u2019ve got them figured out.\u00a0 The body can only take so much of that before fatigue becomes a real issue, and by the end of last night I could tell that the team is getting tired from the long days up here without the beneficial lift that flying successful missions brings with it.<\/p>\n

\"A<\/a>

A foil-wrapped DataHawk 2 payload bay. Unfortunately, this did not completely solve our problem…<\/p><\/div>\n

This morning, we spent a bit more time troubleshooting and found that while not 100% repeatable, what we had experienced the day before was again happening frequently.\u00a0 Without additional avenues to pursue, at lunch time we decided that it was time to begin going after\u00a0some atmospheric measurements (what we came here to do in the first place!!).\u00a0 To do so, we kept our flights to manual mode only, and had Will and Nathan perform hand-flown profiles through the lower Arctic atmosphere.\u00a0 By applying maximum climb rate to get through the \u201cdanger zone\u201d, we were able to, for the most part, get the plane to an altitude where it seems to be out of reach of the radar.\u00a0 This has allowed us to capture hourly profiles of the lowest 500 m of the atmosphere between around 11 am and 9\u00a0pm today.\u00a0 I can\u2019t tell you how good it feels to begin collecting measurements \u2014 we\u2019ll do more of this tomorrow while simultaneously trying to continue troubleshooting the radar interference.<\/p>\n

\"Temperature<\/a>

Temperature profiles from the surface to 500 m above the surface from 6 August. These were collected roughly once per hour, with the earliest profiles (starting around 11 am) in blue, and the latest profiles in red.<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The reality of field work is sometimes an ugly one.\u00a0 In an ideal world, you show up to your site, the weather\u2019s good, your instruments and tools work, and you get a fantastic dataset.\u00a0 That, through preparation of your team and your equipment (and usually by a little bit of luck on the weather side)… Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":38,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-48","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-05-04 22:38:58","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category"},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ciresblogs.colorado.edu\/erasmus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ciresblogs.colorado.edu\/erasmus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ciresblogs.colorado.edu\/erasmus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ciresblogs.colorado.edu\/erasmus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/38"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ciresblogs.colorado.edu\/erasmus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=48"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/ciresblogs.colorado.edu\/erasmus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":53,"href":"https:\/\/ciresblogs.colorado.edu\/erasmus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48\/revisions\/53"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ciresblogs.colorado.edu\/erasmus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=48"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ciresblogs.colorado.edu\/erasmus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=48"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ciresblogs.colorado.edu\/erasmus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=48"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}