The incidental data that might be produced by launching another ISS-bound heavy-lifter from Kennedy Space Center some 10-11 degrees before a clear-skyed sunrise – to duplicate the launch conditions of Space Shuttle STS-131 Discovery – may lead to a shorter trip to Mars through faster space flight.
Discovery's launch produced in succession a comet-like coma hundreds of miles long, followed by an abruptly luminous pale-blue cloud which, as it evolved through spheroid, throne, “Klingon battle cruiser”, toroid, and other shapes, occupied 2 degrees of sky as seen from Jacksonville, Florida. Review of scores of photos and literally hundreds of Youtube videos led this Electric Universe layman to key-in and to comparative-plot the Vehicle Ascent Statistics for 5 space shuttles from thousands of SpaceVid video frames. Found amongst STS-131's launch plots was a sudden 27-mile over-increase in range, and a subsequent 40-second decrease in launch time-to-MECO (Main Engine CutOff).
While the author waits for corroborating synchronous telemetry, he recounts all personal observations, questions, and data collected to date. Ongoing experiments include: A 30-minute personal video of the predicted cloud appearance from STS-134 has been reduced to cropped stills, to be edited by histogramic time-series analysis [being programmed], plotted, and re-animated with ambient sky-scatter removed. The plot is expected to show a mesa-like rise-and-drop in energetic cam-corder light frequencies. The re-constituted, now black-background video is expected to show both a self-illuminating cloud and, at some point approaching cloud dissolution, the characteristic torus of electromagnetic activity. Once the STS-134 experiment has been completed, a similar trial for the more challenging STS-131 visual data will be attempted.
