APEP: Eclipse Sounding Rocket Campaign

Aroh Barjatya; Robert Clayton; Shantanab Debchoudhury; Matthew Zettergren; Henry Valentine; Nathan Graves; Rachel Conway; Peter Ribbens; Joshua Milford; Kenneth Obenberger; Jeffrey Holmes; Jorge (Koki) Chau; Kristina Lynch; Sebastijan Mrak; Terry Bullett

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu24-13772

[Back] [Session ST3.4]

EGU24-13772, updated on 09 Mar 2024

https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu24-13772

EGU General Assembly 2024

© Author(s) 2024. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

APEP: Eclipse Sounding Rocket Campaign

Aroh Barjatya¹, Robert Clayton¹, Shantanab Debchoudhury¹, Matthew Zettergren¹, Henry Valentine¹, Nathan Graves¹, Rachel Conway¹, Peter Ribbens¹, Joshua Milford¹, Kenneth Obenberger², Jeffrey Holmes², Jorge (Koki) Chau³, Kristina Lynch⁴, Sebastijan Mrak⁵, and Terry Bullett⁶

Aroh Barjatya et al.

¹Embry Riddle Aeronautical University, Physical Sciences Department, Daytona Beach, United States of America (aroh.barjatya@erau.edu)
²Air Force Research Laboratory, Kirtland, New Mexico, USA
³Leibnitz Institute of Atmospheric Physics, Kuhlungsborn, Germany
⁴Dartmouth College, New Hampshire, USA
⁵JHU Applied Physics Laboratory, Maryland, USA
⁶Front Range Radio, LLC

Solar eclipses present a unique opportunity to study the effects of a supersonic cooling shadow and its modulation of the structure and energetics of the ionosphere-thermosphere system. Atmospheric Perturbations around Eclipse Path (APEP) is an eclipse rocket campaign that launched 3 sounding rockets from White Sands Missile Range (WSMR) during the Oct 2023 annular eclipse and will launch 3 sounding rockets from the Wallops Flight Facility (WFF) during the April 2024 total solar eclipse. This campaign will be the first simultaneous multipoint spatio-temporal in-situ observations of electrodynamics and neutral dynamics associated with solar eclipses. For each eclipse, the first instrumented rocket will be launched ~35 minutes before peak local eclipse, second at peak local eclipse, third ~35 minutes after peak local eclipse. The launches are supported by ground-based observations from AFRL Digisondes for WSMR launch and by VIPIR Dynasonde and Millstone ISR for WFF launch. Ground based meteor radar observations of neutral winds are also performed for both eclipses. These observations will be used to constrain comprehensive modeling during data analysis.

How to cite: Barjatya, A., Clayton, R., Debchoudhury, S., Zettergren, M., Valentine, H., Graves, N., Conway, R., Ribbens, P., Milford, J., Obenberger, K., Holmes, J., Chau, J. (., Lynch, K., Mrak, S., and Bullett, T.: APEP: Eclipse Sounding Rocket Campaign, EGU General Assembly 2024, Vienna, Austria, 14–19 Apr 2024, EGU24-13772, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu24-13772, 2024.