 Hey everyone from wherever you're joining welcome back to Super Science Saturday this year We're streaming live from our homes and the NCAR Mesa lab in Boulder, Colorado to yours And we're really glad y'all could be here today So if you don't know about the National Center for Atmospheric Research or NCAR We're a world-leading organization dedicated to studying the Earth system and that includes, you know climate weather our atmosphere our Sun and how all of these systems work together to impact society If you're here for our previous segment, I hope you had an awesome time at the dance party I know I certainly did so big shout out to Ali for pumping up the energy to give us going this morning And I want to take that energy that we have now from the dance party to talk about Instruments that we can use to do our science as well as rockets So here at NCAR, we love your questions about science So throughout this segment you can ask your questions through one of two ways You can either use the Slido platform and I'll go ahead and pop the link in the chat Or if you're joining us on zoom you can ask right in the zoom Q&A And we're gonna have some time for those questions and answers a little bit later And with that, let's get going and go hang out with Tim, Jeff and Matt for it really is rocket science Really is rocket science The rocket science Wizards right now to tell you about all the fun we had and as Dan said, you know instruments are a Story of the atmosphere and those instruments to music instruments It's science in order to better understand what's going on through collecting data We live by the data the observations that we understand what's going on and a little bit more I'm gonna start over to Jeff Why is data so important? Either a little to the tens of thousands of you watching out there on the internet I like to like play to the importance of weather data now What's very interesting is that we know that we have surface observations And there's our tens of thousands of those collected every hour And if you consider all of the citizens that they're collecting data There are actually hundreds of millions of surface observations collected every day Which is fantastic. It helps us understand what's going on with the atmosphere But the atmosphere is three-dimensional It has volume and we don't have citizens up in the atmosphere to collect data We don't have nearly as many sensors in the atmosphere to collect data And we need to be able to understand what the current state of the atmosphere is So that we can make accurate forecasts So all of our numerical weather predictions are our models that create these forecasts Work much better if they have a very proper understanding of what the current state of the atmosphere is And so for us to get better forecasts It's very important for us to understand not only what's happening at the surface Both the temperature and pressure and moisture content of the atmosphere is All the way up from the surface to the top of the atmosphere Now here in the united states, we launch balloons every 12 hours from multiple sites in each state Well, we only get about 150 different locations. So these balloon launches And so our information in the troposphere and the stratosphere is dramatically less than we have at the surface And so these are these two reasons why we launch rockets or drop sands out of airplanes or balloons To collect information about what's going on in the atmosphere from the top of the atmosphere all the way down to the surface There we go Perfect So it's really really important and dan mentioned sands We is is one of the instrument types that we use And songs are actually when you think about if you think of your what specifically hurricanes Drops on are the workhorse of hurricane forecast saying they came right from NCAR. We started the work in 70 perfected Today those are what we use and they write the weather The instrument We are cleared to drop this small cylinder is called a drop sonde or sonde for short And what a story it tells it launches from an aircraft and falls through the air Gathering data about the atmosphere as it descends It's a workhorse of hurricane forecasting dropping out of hurricane hunter airplanes right into a raging storm Dropsons have a huge impact on understanding hurricanes and predicting hurricanes Electrical engineer terry hoke and colleagues at NCAR the national center for atmospheric research Have been designing building and improving drop sonde technology for more than 30 years for a wide range of applications This is the drop sonde that the nsf aircraft use for our scientific research purposes And it's also extensively used by the hurricane research people Compared to earlier models today's sawns are lighter weight relatively inexpensive and loaded with sensors And we actually have a temperature and humidity sensors down here at the bottom And then we also have a parachute here at the top end of it as it falls the drop sonde checks the pulse of its surroundings Two times a second including pressure temperature humidity wind speed and wind direction We're just taking these vertical slices the atmosphere constantly as the sonde falls And you can see how the winds are in a circular pattern going around the hurricane So the the center of the hurricane is going to be in here and they use this data Along with other data to classify the hurricane hoke and his team custom fit aircraft with sawned launchers including this one for helium filled balloons In 2010 american and french researchers deployed balloons over antarctica that dropped 600 sawns To study atmospheric conditions and the shifting ozone layer over a four month period That has mapped the Antarctic atmosphere like it's never been done before As the sawns is falling we're seeing every single little measurement Show up immediately on the computer screen Such inside information is helping scientists learn more about the Scientists learn more about the atmospheric conditions that spawn hurricanes Hoke expects this will help forecasters make earlier and more precise predictions Giving people in the path of a killer storm more time to evacuate out of harm's way For science nation i'm myles o' brian the workhorse of hurricane forecasting drop sands and of course because we're wizards we thought What if a drop sands is going to go down I wonder what would happen if it went up and I think between uh jeph and i we probably have what would you say 50 25 how many years of building just model rockets together our combined history About I've been building rockets for about 45 years and I know you have as well We're probably close to 100 years of rocket building 100 years of rocket building We're like what would happen if we put a drops on a rocket and shut up into the sky Just an idea of what that means Rockets model rockets come in all different forms and some of you might remember this from star trek Well, this is actually a model rocket that I built when I was 12 I think the one difference you might notice is there's a little hole up here And a little catch in the back here. That's where we put in an Estus model needs some repair work You have to put in a little engine in there to get that thing going up And that's one of the advanced rockets the basic rockets look more like This one with body tubes and fins And a parachute and those going to bring it down and I thought well Maybe we could get a rocket that takes a payload Like this one actually this is what's left of the rocket and the payload went up at the top So we stuck the drops on On top of the rocket and you're probably getting an idea of it didn't quite go so well but we put a drops on on top of the rocket And we set it up into the sky and it looked a little something like oh before before I mentioned that We we thought well, this would be great But every time you come up with the science idea you try to figure out if you can do it And then the third step is to go and ask the safety people How to do this safely and we literally went to Riva who is golden And asked like how do we do this safely she went out to our earth observing site Checked it out and checked with all of the scientists who have the instrument And said can we launch a rocket out here and found out how to do that safely And we even brought in Matt If you're a launcher rocket you need to have someone put it out here And Riva and Matt on site and all the Okay, so We have the rockets here that we launched I think we're getting ready to show Some videos of us launching these rockets now what's incredibly important as Tim was saying is that You have to be safe with these Colorado has been very dry lately And so it's imperative that you launch these in places where there are Long dry grasses or other things that could catch on fire And so we were taking the proper safety precautions at our earth observation location And we did take proper precautions. We had some fantastic rocket launches Now We did a test rocket launch With this rocket that we did just to kind of test how the winds were drifting that day Before we launched up the rockets with the sensors inside of them. So here's a video of Some of the rocket launches as it's going up. It will be sampling the air For temperature and humidity pressure Tim's carefully launching this onto the launch pad Inside here We have the instrumentation We're using a d engine for us to rockets Tim has smoothed the launch vehicle He's got good rotation here. This is how we do science in wizard land Okay, sky's clear Where's the parachute, Tim? It didn't look quite like we wanted it to Uh, but you know, it's rocket science. It really is rocket science And then we thought well If Our wizard Matt here said well, what about radios on and Matt, do you want to a little bit about You do Sure. Yeah, so I Often helped launch radios on so we attached them to weather balloons So it's kind of the same idea as the drop sands except instead of dropping them out of a plane We attach them to a balloon filled with helium much like you would have at your party store at a birthday party And they get lifted up all the way up through the atmosphere And take those same measurements of temperature pressure humidity and the winds Um so that we can know what's going on above our heads That's excellent. Yep And we captured on video the what we are are stepping through to doing the radios on So we'll go to the video and you check out what it looked like as we sequence over to the radios on rocket Okay, here we are with our second launch. This is our Radios on rocket. We did our drop sonde rocket with mac over here a little earlier And that was a it was a good rocket flight. Maybe not a good song flight So, uh, yeah, we're gonna try again. See if we get another good Sonde, I mean a good rocket flight collect some data and see why the sands are the way we actually do it Instead of with rockets that help us set this one up. So we've got a radios on inside this rocket This is a different rocket because the drop sonde rocket is Done, uh, not using that one anymore. It's done its job. It's done its job, right? Yeah, and we have a nice calm day for doing this. We got some great data with the Drop sonde rocket and that's on mac's computer over there, and then we are collecting Ground data or collecting data with the radios on from the trail. I heard that's just over On the other side of the site here. So we've got an engine in this bad boy. We're going to What are the sampling rates of this tim? What are the sampling rates on this matt? I should be one per second one per second one measurement per second. So one hertz Okay, fantastic. We're measuring temperature and temperature relative humidity and pressure and possibly winds Based on the gps location What's the difference between a drop sonde and a radiosonde? Not much, but typically a radiosonde goes up and a drop sonde comes down That's really the big difference. They measure the same kind of parameters How you send it through the atmosphere that matters So we're the big difference for this between the drop sonde and the radiosonde is the drop sonde's meant to go faster So measures that Twice a second instead of once a second All right, so again it didn't go like we wanted it But we did get data from the the radiosonde rocket as well And we can we can actually we have the analysis from matt and it was pretty cool We could show you what it looks like to do the analysis right over in the trailer Here we are going back to the data collection site see what happened with the Radio rockets on see what the data looks like or If we got any data Yeah, all right. Here we are inside the trailer matt. What do we got? Okay, so this is the data that was coming in so we can see that it's no longer because our radiosonde Now looks like this So it's not sending data anymore It looks like according to this It never detected that we launched it So usually as soon as you release it it starts going up This software will detect. Oh, I'm going up could because pressure is dropping So it knows that it's been launched in such recording data But that didn't seem to happen this time. Maybe because it all went too fast Oh It's also possible that we just lost the signal as max said These are supposed to go up a lot slower than on a rocket So it's not meant to record that quickly That may be what happened in this case, but the last measurement that we got Was 28 degrees celsius Uh 15 percent relative humidity so pretty dry for here in colorado and This blue line is the pressure and actually If we zoom in here This was the pressure at the just on the ground there and you can see the pressure did actually drop and come back Up a little bit. So we did probably measure data. It just didn't know that it had launched You can see the temperature dropped a little bit pressure dropped a little bit relative humidity went up So we actually collected data just in that tiny little So how long it does there's a split second worth of data that we got there About six seconds five or six seconds worth of data six seconds worth of data But we actually measured the pressure drop at the very least and a change in temperature and humidity That's awesome, dude. Yeah All right, so there you go We uh did a little science out there and had some fun while we're while we're making it happen and learn some things About what it means to put a center on a rocket and how that all works out Matt, would you like to like talk about the the drops on data? What that looked like? Sure, I can do that also. I think we have a plot here that we're going to show Um and so Perfect. Yes. So these are some of the things we've measured with the drops on so on the left we have the pressure The middle graph there shows the temperature and the right shows humidity Which is just a measure of moisture or how much water is in the air So the blue lines show our measurements as the rockets were going up So we can see there that pressure was decreasing From the left side from the right side of that graph to the left The pressure was decreasing as it went up The temperature also decreased as it went up And humidity actually sort of increased as it went up And then the red lines show the rocket coming back down. So again, we see that pressure Increased as we went back down as we would expect in the atmosphere Temperature actually continued to decrease. We don't usually expect that So that probably tells us that it's not a very good measurement And the humidity also continued to increase which we don't really know quite what that means but this goes to show that Rockets are probably not the best way to gather these measurements Excellent. Yeah, so, you know wizards were a little edgy and uh, we did the science that Maybe that scientist wouldn't normally think of doing but we got it done It might not be the best way to collect the data, but it sure was a lot of fun. Yes, it was definitely was And I wondered if we have any questions from People are watching us. We'll check in So i'm not seeing any questions yet definitely pop them either into the slido Or the or the zoom chat, but I had a question for for for y'all So did you make these rockets yourself? And if so, how did you build them? Ah Well, uh, yes, we did actually make them ourselves And the will we modify them as I brought this up earlier This was a standard estus rocket with a payload section at the top And we simply replaced that payload with the the drop zone Which is this circuit board and normally on top there would be the sensors to actually collect those data Because we had to have a bigger tube in order to get the radio sun in there And you can see where we had a big problem on the landing. It didn't come down so well No, it's kind of not cheaper than it is. So yeah, this was a A specifically built once you've worked on rockets for a long time you get to a point where you know exactly what the The parameters are for making a rocket that works because it's rocket science And Then I checked in with Jeff and Jeff. Do you remember the engine issue that we had? Uh, which engine issue is that? We had many engine issues Well, we had we had some trouble getting them started, but we also didn't have a powerful enough engine One of the rockets came to well, both of them came down a little bit faster than we wanted and the Shoot didn't deploy so Two different problems we had with the the engines and the shoots Yeah, we were hoping to use the larger e engine, but we ended up using the d engines Estus rockets makes engines all of the cues and ours and and those are done by actual people who are actually Using rockets to measure the atmosphere think about 100,000 150,000 feet up. Uh, it's phenomenal You know ours was kind of a fun kind of thing But you know real rocket science they're using big estus rockets Hues and ours and going to 100,000 or 50,000 feet up. So maybe we'll do that next time There we go And one of the unique things we had to be careful of is all of the instruments that surround Surrounded our launch site which are in development and testing right now One of them is set to go to Antarctica to collect data from there And uh, we have a there's a huge radar just uh nearest and a collapsible tower So what we had to do was The launch on the days when the wind were calm and we happened to have one of the best meteorologists in colorado as a wizard Mr. Weber, uh, who Set us up and he said we were out there ready to launch and I said Jeff When are the winds going to die down because it was a little breezy and he said at nine o'clock Guess what nine oh five? They started to taper off and we were good to go so well done there wizard So we did have a question pop up in the chat might be the last one we have time to answer for john Based on what you learned. What would you change if you were going to do this again? Ooh, I'm gonna throw that over to matt and juff. What would you do differently? Well, I think for one a larger rocket or a bigger engine to get up higher because we really would like to know What's happening even higher up? um Secondly, maybe we would design our own instrument from scratch That could take these measurements faster. Like I said the radio sonde Only takes measurements once per second, but the rocket goes up really quickly So if we could measure more quickly than that, maybe 10 measurements per second, we could get some really good data Yeah, and something that I might suggest is maybe working on our parachute deployment It was kind of a hazard having those come down at full speed and we would have collected significantly more data With a large parachute and then floating down. We would have had much more time in the air And we've been able to collect more data. So maybe a bigger engine and a bigger parachute so we could collect more data That makes sense And I'm going to squeeze one more question in here from pilot and they're wondering can rockets be Too big so they don't work Well, you know rockets They have weight and so as long as you have a a big enough engine to lift the weight on the rocket It will work for example the Saturn 5 the biggest rocket ever made by nasa is You know hundreds of feet tall and weighs millions and millions of pounds And yet that's what got our astronauts to the moon And so when you compare our one pound estus rocket to the hundreds and hundreds of millions of pounds of a Saturn 5 rocket There's there's a lot of difference, but yet they still work with the same physics You still have a rocket engine that is exerting a force and then the action the reaction going in the opposite direction And so no matter how big the rockets are they still kind of maintain the same physics mentality And so as long as you have a really big engine you can watch a rocket as big as you want Yeah You also have to consider where that the weight is dispersed across that engine that rocket's body because it is possible To get a rocket that doesn't go up And spirals and go sideways. So there's a there's a I would highly recommend if you're interested in checking out the estus rockets to get started with the baby steps and Work your way up to Like jeff said some really really big rockets All right, this was really cool. I mean who doesn't like attaching stuff to rockets and launching it into the air, right? So with that tim jeff and matt Thank you so much for telling us all about drop songs and radio songs and attaching them to rockets And as you heard in the show, you know, don't want to rocket unless you're doing it safely So our next show is going to start at the top of the hour 10 o'clock mountain time and we hope to see you there