13 – 14-Aug-2021: Everything worked!

Recovery helicopter bringing the TWIN gondola

The gondola landed on 13-Aug around 5 am in a wooded area, and it was found and brought by helicopter to Esrange where our team was already waiting. We expected some damage, but it looked untouched, not even dirty. We proceeded to unload, check the equipment and data, and start the Aircore measurements that needed to be done asap.

Everything appears to have functioned. The cryosampler had still liquid neon inside, and it looks like it worked well – we will only have the final confirmation after several weeks when we can open the samples. The in-situ measurements and the aircore profiles look really interesting. The bag samples contained air and were already transferred in glass flasks for long term storage. All is good so far!

Now the equipment is being packed for shipping, and in the next days we head back home. We will be doing measurements on these samples and analyzing the data for quite some time from now. Hopefully, a lot of interesting science will come out of this project.

I will write more about the launch and the flight in the next days, and I’ll post some cool photos and movies after I get them approved.

Here is Andreas emptying the left over liquid neon from the cryosampler. I’ve never seen liquid neon before, it appears somewhat greenish, but it evaporates too fast to see it well. The white fog is just water condensed from the air – spectacular, but not dangerous