Hey All!
Today our team had some lengthy discussions on where we want to proceed from our current situation. Challenger has been in trouble the past few weeks with a faulty compass, however with some crafty work by Dave Aragon, we have been able to fine tune our glider back to flying decently well. Lately the focus of our tests have been to compare commanded heading with measured heading to see how close we are able to get. The past two surfacings this evening have been one segment due south followed by one to the west; both of which provided some good results giving us confidence that we can accurately fly in those directions. For the rest of the night, we have moved the way point back to the north west which will give us some values of our ability to fly to the north.
Depending on the results of these tests, coupled with a following analysis of what speeds we can maintain and how we are doing energy wise, we will make a decision on where we will fly. As a team we have agreed that we don’t want to turn back towards Cape Town. So our options are now to either continue along the original path, which takes us north of St Helena and Ascenion Island which is roughly 6,400 km; a route south of the islands again ending in Fortaleza that measures 5,900 km; Making a B-Line across the middle of the South Atlantic landing in Rio De Janeiro; or taking a further southern route and landing in the Falkland Islands. Another option is to follow along flying for the northern route and making a decision further along on if we want to cut back down to the south and heading towards Rio. Either way this mission will take a lot of team work to succeed.
One tool I looked at today to try and aid in our decisions on what path to take, was taking the currents created in myocean, and plotting the individual U and V values in google earth.
V components for the South Atlantic
In the top image, we can see a potential path we can follow with the meandering light blue path which represents weaker currents with a flux to the west. Matching these areas to the second photo where red is north currents, it looks like this path may hold true. Although it will take 2/3 of the mission to get there, the equatorial current will be our goal as those dark blue currents are fast- nearly .5m/s. If we can make it to this region, we will have a nice final 2,000 km down hill coast into Fortaleza, Brazil.
Force Wind Sea & Honor