She’s a Rocket

The Scarlet Knight is wasting no time leaving this piece of ocean behind.  She is rocketing towards Flores, flying over 8 km in 8 hours into a head current. Once again, Scarlet lives up to her reputation as a fast glider.

Her heading is beautiful. She is averaging about a 2 or 3 degree to the left heading error. Big change from the 360 degree spins to the right we saw just a few days ago.  We can even use the fin offset on Scarlet to correct for this small difference.

The heading and yo profile plot below is awesome.  We’ll need to change the y-axis scales on the heading error plot back to the pre-launch scales.  Vertical velocities are abck up to 20-30 cm/sec.  The yo’s are symmetric on upcast and downcast.

Guidance from the European side says we should head northeast from here, favoring the northern route to the mainland.  So we’ve reset the waypoint to the northeast and will pass it on to Scarlet at the noon surfacing.  We’ll be heading into that field of filaments to our east.  Each of these filaments are elongated in the north-south direction, so most of the currents are running north-south.  This is when we’ll need Scarlet to use her speed and fly downfield. Its also when the U.S. football analogy comes into play. It matters less how far north or south the currents move us.  We are trying the head downfield to the east, until we cross the goaline.  The goaline just happens to be 2000 km away.  On the U.S. football field, considering the full mission, I make us out to be on the 35 yard line.  With the speed we gained from the visit by the Nevertheless, we are again first down and 10, heading northeast to the filament field.  We don’t know what to expect there, but European guidance again is that the biology will be worse if we head east along the southern route.

Back to our west, what is left of Tropical Storm Danny is sitting off of the U.S. east coast, heading north.  It no longer looks tropical in the cloud images.

Checking in on the NOAA National Hurricane Center, the remnants of Danny will move past New Jersey today and be in the U.K. by Thursday.  5 days to cross the Atlantic.   

We now eagerly await the return to shore of the field team. The Nevertheless should be making landfall in Flores sometime today.