Project I.N.V.A.D.E.R. -- thoughts

[mikegeukes]

Kiel Ortega wrote:

True...but we witnessed several aircraft around the Ulysses storm while the tornado was on the ground.

What you saw maybe was the Western Kansas Weather Modification Program based out of Lakin, KS This outfit been seeding clouds to reduce hail for many years in southwest Kansas, could of been the airplanes you saw flying around.

Mike

 

[Warren Eckels]

1200-2000 meters?

Launch Considerations and Questions:

* Trinity must be launched with tornadic inflow winds.
* Downdrafts and precipitation must be avoided.
* A parachute glide-in is believed to be the best approach to entering the vortex.
* Even if the rocket is destroyed by the tornado- mission accomplished! We expect that the rocket will indeed be destroyed upon vortex entry.
* How far will Trinity travel when launched horizontally? The rocket is too dangerous to test launch horizontally at the test fields we use. The rocket could cause serious damage to property or very serious injury at 480 MPH.

The answer to the last question, given no wind resistance or forces other than gravity acting on the rocket, would be a maximum of about 2.4 km:

Launching at 45 degrees above horizontal to maximize the horizontal distance flown, we get

At launch:

v0(x) = 216 sin 45* m/s = 153 m/s = v0(y)

During flight:

v0(y) = 153t - 9.8t^2

The zeroes of this equation are found at t = 0 s and t = 15.6 s

(153 m/s)(15.6 s) = 2390 m = 1.5 miles

The maximum height attained by a rocket thus launched would take place at t = 7.8 s and would be about 600 m

Positioning oneself in the dry sector of a supercell within 2.4 km of sufficient inflow to carry a large model rocket while staying out of downdrafts and precipitation and assuring that the inflow would lead to the tornado itself are exercises left to the reader.

(For that matter, why not just launch a bunch of reasonably large and sturdy balloons into the inflow?)

 

[Aric Cylkowski]

Sterling A. Colgate tried firing rockets into a tornado from a large plane during the 1970s, but since the rockets were unguided, they would always deviate from their path and miss. Of course, you can't do guided missiles because of FAA regulations, I believe.

It does sound like the safest bet is for a balloon launched into the inflow with just enough bouyancy to get clear of power lines and houses, but low enough so it doesn't drift too high into the storm before entering the tornado. However, if the tornado is too violent, it could destroy the balloon long before it reached the tornado. Of course, you run the risk of having a rocket with an instrument package destroyed before it reaches the tornado if it is too violent.

 

[bvassmer]

Even if they could get this rocket into the tornado... what kind of instuments are they going to put in it? I know there site isnt much help (the early design of their rockets shows they have an area below the nose for their instuments... but nothing saying what instruments).

What type of instruments would researchers want in there? What could fit in that rocket?

 

[Amos Magliocco]

A mouse. They could fit a mouse in there.

To honor Tim Samaras' legitimate experiments, in fact, they could call their mouse T.I.M. for Tornado Intercept Mouse.

Originally posted by bvassmer
What type of instruments would researchers want in there? What could fit in that rocket?

 

[Glen Romine]

Really, launching rockets into tornadoes to collect data is not entirely without merit. No to say that I'm endorsing the method this group proposes, but fundamentally this is could be a sound technique to gather data. Instruments that collect temperature, pressure and moisture data are extremely small these days thanks to advances in electronics - so you certainly can make meaningful measurements that would fit on a rocket - and the financial costs for what ends up becoming a disposable weather instrument become more realistic when the cost can be reduced to a few hundred dollars per probe (rockets are fairly cheap).

There are designs underway to instrument small planes to fly around storms during the next VORTEX project, assuming it gets funded, but these instruments are not meant to be flown into the actual tornado. As previously mentioned, there were some efforts by Stirling Colgate to launch airplane based rockets into tornadoes back in the 80's, but these efforts were largely unsuccessful. Tim's probes are extremely valuable as they are sampling conditions at the ground - where damage occurs - but alone don't provided enough information to fully understand the dynamics of tornadoes.

Another use for rockets proposed in the past is to use them to disperse chaff (small pieces of foil) which allows radars to then "see" air motions in portions of a storm where the chaff is deployed - which is useful for sensing the winds in portions of a storm where this is no precipitation to make it "visible" to the radar.

Erik Rasmussen, who is an innovative although somewhat isolated scientist, is leading the effort to develop the unmanned aircraft probes described above as a part of the RECUV Project, but has also been working with concepts to develop rocket-based deployments, and this may still someday come to fruition.

Glen