East coasters-- keep your eyes to the sky tonight.
A NASA Experiment Is Going to Light Up the Sky With Beautifully Colored Clouds Tonight
If youre on the east coast tonight, keep an eye on the sky between 7pm and 9pm: NASA is launching a test of some new tech that will include releasing colorful vapor tracers 130 miles above the Earth. It sounds like its going to be beautiful.
The vapors will be ejected from a sounding rocket launched from Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia. NASA explains that it has actually been injecting various vapor tracers into the atmosphere since the 1950sthese trails help scientists understand the naturally occurring flows of ionized and neutral particles in the upper atmosphere by injecting color tracers and tracking the flow across the sky.
Tonight, NASA says its ejecting four different payloads of a mix of barium and strontium, creating a cloud with a mixture of blue-green and red color. Heres an example of a barium release provided by NASA; on the upper left you can see the bariums ionized component, which has become elongated along the Earths magnetic field lines.
http://gizmodo.com/a-nasa-experiment-is-going-to-light-up-the-sky-with-bea-1735168250