Thursday (Week 4) The Auroral Anomaly

       One would think that finding a satellite or weather center that kept track of the Earth's auroral activity would be a simple google search. Unfortunately this is not the case, all of the data of auroras from the satellites and weather stations is restricted and can not be viewed without some type of clearance, needless to say me and Halle had a difficult time finding the data we needed. We decided to talk with Dr. D (our professor) and see what he want us to do. We looked for an entire day to try and find the auroral data before going to him and he found the data in about 45 seconds... Sure enough it was on one of the sites we had already looked at, but had missed a tab at the top of the site that brings up the auroral data. Tomorrow our job will be to understand and apply this new data as a second reference point, the first being the Goes satellite at L1 (1.5 million miles away from Earth), this will reduce the margin of error of the drag factor to a value that will be acceptable and be able to be used.

Matt, SC