posted 07-14-2024 08:33 AM               

Space Cover 762: Solar Eclipse Sounding Rockets

The cover above was postmarked at Wallops Island, Virginia on April 8, 2024, the date of the recent solar eclipse over the United States. The Aristocrat Cachet discusses the three Black Brant IX sounding rockets launched from Wallops that day to study atmospheric perturbations around the eclipse path. The sounding rocket payloads, built by a consortium of universities, had already flown during the 2023 eclipse over the US, and were refurbished for the 2024 eclipse.

So, I hadn't paid a lot of attention to sounding rocket covers nor eclipse covers. Then the latest edition of "Quest: The History of Spaceflight Quarterly" (2024 Volume 31, No. 2) came out with an excellent article about sounding rockets flown during solar eclipses! And it had the table below (reprinted below from Quest) logging the solar eclipse sounding rocket launches known to the author.

Well, when you put a flight log in front of a hardcore space cover collector, that collector is instinctively bound to go on a crusade to see if there are covers out there for each of those flights! So, welcome to my new crusade! 😊

A couple quick notes on the flight log:

1. For the July 20, 1963 eclipse, McMahan lists a Wallops Island launch not listed in the flight log above. I'm not sure if this is an omission of the flight log, an error in McMahan, or whether some Wallops servicer just spontaneously made a cover that day.

2. Also note that no sounding rocket launches were attempted for the 2017 solar eclipse over North America, although both NASA WB-57 aircraft flew instruments to study the solar corona.

The March 7, 1970 solar eclipse sounding rocket launches were pretty well (if not always accurately) documented. Above is the Andromeda Cachet cover for the Wallops Island sounding rocket launches that day, and below it an Artopages cachet cover for two launches from White Sands that day. The "inaccurate" statement above applies to the Andromeda Cachet that states 32 launches that day vs. 25 in the log, and the fact that the log does not list any White Sands launches that day. So, differences abound. The effort to recover one of the March 7, 1970 sounding rocket payloads off of Wallops Island is described in detail in SCOTW 144.

And a cover for the Concorde flight during the June 30, 1973 eclipse (but not the sounding rocket launch) is shown in SCOTW 363.

What other solar eclipse sounding rocket launch covers are out there? And the functional words here are "solar eclipse sounding rocket launch", not covers commemorating the eclipse in general. Let's post 'em!

posted 07-14-2024 09:37 AM               

I think (actually, no, I know) that that table is well short of the number of solar eclipse sounding rocket launches that have occurred, although it is a useful start. Maybe Dennis you could coordinate a more comprehensive list!?

I am about to begin fully cataloguing my collection, and have not yet even begun to have gotten around to indexing by subject, and so I can only contribute one example at the moment...

But it is illustrative of my opening comments because although the solar eclipse date of 10 July 1972 is in the Quest table this is a cover for a different type of sounding rocket launched from a different launch location.