HUNTSVILLE, Al — The Japanese Space Agency has long grappled with the problem of delayed space launches resulting from the many days of cloudy skies Japan experiences in its winter launch window. But they are getting some help from a team of UAH scientists.
Hugh Christian, a UAH Earth System Science Center (ESSC) principal research scientist, and some colleagues are working with the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) to develop new rules that will ease launch restrictions while still protecting spacecraft from dangerous lightning strikes.
The team just returned from Japan's Tanegashima Space Center launch site, where they boarded a small jet outfitted with instruments that collected data about lightning strikes and other atmospheric data. That data will be used to develop new guidelines to help determine which clouds pose a real threat of damaging lightning strikes.
The team is cautiously optimistic about the early findings.
"The preliminary results are that the clouds are not that electrified. But we still have to analyze our data and compare it with the dual-pole doplar radar data from the Tanegashima radar," he said.
"This will help us come up with a much better rule than the old 'thick cloud' rule we've been stuck with," he said.
This type of research is not a new thing for the team. Christian and his UAH colleagues have been involved in similar research campaigns around NASA's Cape Canaveral launch facility since the 1990s, and helped develop NASA's lightning safety protocols.
The six instruments installed on the business-size jet were electric field mills, which measure the atmosphere's static electrical field. Flights through storm clouds told the UAHuntsville team how much of a lightning threat that system presented.
Christian said the Japanese space agency wants to expand the program into a three-year study, which could mean future flights for the UAH team