Florida Weather: The historic launch of SpaceX-NASA can once again be canceled

“Scrub is part of doing spaceflight safely and successfully. During my last mission to @Space_Station the weather also caught us!” tweeted Bob Behnken, one of two astronauts who will ride the SpaceX’s Crew Dragon Capsule.

Experts are on the lookout for lightning

Lightning is one of the biggest concerns for the launch planned this weekend.

Pat Hyland, a research fellow for the University of Oklahoma Mesoscale Meteorological Cooperative Institute (CIMMS) who supports NOAA National Severe Storms Laboratory (NSSL), spent several years researching this very topic. During his undergraduate and graduate research, funded in part by a NASA EPSCoR grant, he focused on investigating the electric field factory network (EFM) at the Kennedy Space Center to determine the level of false alarms, and to assist NASA’s Lightning Launch Commitment. Criteria.

“The motivation for this research is partly because studies show that more than half of the lightning casualties result from the first or one of the first few cloud-to-ground (CG) flashes in a storm and that a large number of victims result from returning too fast for activities outside the room, before the lightning really stopped, “Hyland said. “We are looking for potential patterns in what is happening with surface electric fields to hopefully provide guidance for hazard warning decision-making situations, such as what happened at the Kennedy Space Center with their launch.”

They also tried to look for patterns in the atmosphere during the lightning experiment that triggered the rocket.

“This is another reason why, even in the absence of direct lightning around the site, the launch can sometimes be removed because rockets can artificially trigger lightning,” Hyland said.

For example, lightning in that area will cancel flights, just as clouds with electric fields large enough to produce lightning are triggered by rockets. This happens when giant electric sparks occur when large rockets fly through atmospheric electric fields that are strong enough.

The electric field needed to induce lightning triggered by rockets is much lower than natural lightning.

Another danger can also rub the launch

Weather forecasters must also monitor wind, and weather settings from the launchpad.

If there is a sustained wind of 30 mph or more at 162 feet above the launch pad, the mission will be canceled.

Not just the weather at the launch pad location. The Weather Squadron must also monitor the weather downrange because if the Naga Crew Capsule faces a problem, it must have a safe landing location.

A whole team of meteorologists is ready to help from the 45th Space Wing and SpaceX to determine whether the weather will cancel the launch. As on Wednesday, a decision can be taken to take off.