Missile Test Creates Huge Expanding Halo of Light Over Hawaii

The Bad Astronomer writes "A Minuteman III missile launch from California early Wednesday morning created a weird, expanding halo of light seen from the CFHT observatory on Hawaii's Mauna Kea. The third stage of the missile has ports that open and dump fuel into the near-vacuum. This cloud expands rapidly as a spherical shell, shock-exciting the air molecules and causing them to glow, creating the bizarre effect."

Comments

Launch Rescheduled from Before?

[DaveAtFraud]

Any bets that this is the same exercise as the launch we didn't do back in April? We wouldn't want to have North Korea have a hissy fit or anything.

Cheers,
Dave

Re:Test?

[NouberNou]

You answered your own question. These missiles have been active for 40 years. They need to be tested to make sure they work. They go out to the missile fields and they pick a missile at random, pull it out of the silo, remove the warheads, fly it over to Vandy, install instrumentation and dummy warheads, take the crew from the field it was in and fire it down range, making sure everything works right still.

This is also one of the very few times that a crew actually gets to launch a live missile, so its an exciting exercise for them as well, so much so that the exercises are called "Glory Trip".

Anyway, pretty much everyone tests their stockpile of ICBMs and SLBMs to make sure they are working, otherwise deterrence starts to lose some of its credibility.

Furthermore, and a little dark, but think about how amazing it'd look to be in north central Canada if WW3 breaks out on a clear night and you have hundreds of these missiles going down range... The end of the world would be somewhat pretty.

I saw one of these

[rleamon]

In LA in the late 80s. I thought aliens were invading. The sun had set but still illuminated the upper atmosphere, where a strangely large greenish globe of glowing gas gently expanded while a small bright object traveled remarkably slowly through its center. People had stopped and were watching as alertly as I was -- seriously, it was one of those slightly spine-tingling moments when you believe something impossible and possibly very bad might be happening... The next day the newspaper had a short piece about a launch from Vandenberg causing it. Or so they say...

Re:I saw one of these

[Solandri]

Unlike Cape Canaveral which launches into an equatorial orbit to the east, Vandenberg launches into polar orbits to the south, and tests to the Marshall Islands to the west. That means the vapor trail is in prime position to be backlit by sunlight in the upper atmosphere just after sunset, making for very dramatic sights and photos as you describe. If the timing is right, on a clear day it's visible from most of Southern California. A friend of mine has a spectacular photo he took of such a launch from Joshua Tree, which is about 250 miles away.

Re:Dump Fuel?

[twisted_pare]

RTFM: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGM-30_Minuteman "Minuteman-III introduced in the post-boost stage (“bus”) an additional liquid-fuel propulsion system rocket engine (PSRE) that is used to slightly adjust the trajectory."