Stunning image captures rockets being fired at the northern lights
Science!
If you're a NASA researcher stationed in Alaska, you're probably pretty used to seeing the aurora borealis, the sky-watching spectacle better known as the northern lights.
So staffers at the Poker Flat Research Range in Fairbanks decided to do what any bored teenager would do: fire rockets at it! Four small, suborbital sounding rockets were launched from the facility to collect data on the auroras, which are caused by the interaction of solar wind from the sun and the Earth's atmosphere.
According to Slate, one of the experiments — the Mesospheric Inversion-layer Stratified Turbulence (MIST) — releases a compound called "tri-methyl aluminum tracer, which creates white expanding clouds" that "can be used to measure the amount of turbulence in the mesosphere, the layer of atmosphere about the stratosphere."
The other experiment — the Mesosphere-Lower Thermosphere Turbulence Experiment (M-Tex) — was designed to study how auroras and other solar interactions affect satellite orbits.
A composite photo (above) shows all four rockets streaking high above the snow-covered tundra.
NASA also released a high-definition video of the project, shown below:
