NASA Rocket Barrage Will Light Up Mid-Atlantic Coast

coondoggie writes "NASA will this week detail a mission where it will launch five rockets in five minutes from its Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia that will light up the night sky for millions of folks in a swath between New York City and about Wilmington, NC. The five rocket blasts, which could occur between March 14 and April 4, are part of what the space agency calls the Anomalous Transport Rocket Experiment (ATREX), a Heliophysics sounding rocket mission that aims to gather data needed to better understand the high-altitude jet stream located 60 to 65 miles above the surface of the Earth, NASA said." NASA will be hosting a teleconference at 1PM EST on Wednesday to discuss the mission. They also have brief PDF descriptions of the rockets involved: Terrier-Improved Orion, Terrier Oriole, and Terrier Malemute.

Comments

Something to feed the conspiracy folks

[mrxak]

Barrage is not really the word one uses for rockets going up, but for rockets coming back down again with destructive force. A bombardment. An attack. This is all just cover for the final phase of the secret military space weapon. Oh yes, it will light up the sky.

Re:NASA isn't dead?

[khallow]

Does anyone else find it odd that NASA, whom I thought was mostly out of funding, is going to launch 5 rockets to test the jet stream?

No. First, sounding rockets, even the ones used by NASA, are cheap. I'd be surprised if the rocket launches themselves are over a million dollars apiece even with NASA prices. And NASA has a vast amount of funding. Second, atmospheric studies are part of their portfolio. So no oddness here.

Second, from the article:

According to NASA, the five rockets will release a chemical tracer that will form milky, white tracer clouds that let scientists and the public to "see" the winds in space. In addition, two of the rockets will have instrumented payloads, to measure the pressure and temperature in the atmosphere at the height of the high-speed winds.

So they're introducing a chemical tracer. Rockets do so faster, more accurately than balloons, have a great mechanism (their exhaust) for doing so, and can cut through a cross-section of the jet stream while balloons would float with the jet stream.