Photos: NASA Rockets Make Weird Clouds Near Edge of Space

Milky Clouds

Photograph by Jack Fusco, My Shot

Bright bundles of rocket-made clouds outshine the Milky Way in a picture taken from New Jersey's Seaside Park Tuesday morning.

The chemical tracer used in the ATREX mission, called trimethyl aluminum, produces a soft glow as it reacts with the atmosphere, making the clouds easier to see.

The products of the chemical reaction are aluminum oxide, carbon dioxide, and water vapor—three substances found naturally in the atmosphere, NASA says. According to the space agency, the chemical has been employed for decades in rocket studies.

(Related: "Airplane Contrails Boost Global Warming, Study Suggests.")

Published March 27, 2012

Blazing a Trail

Photograph courtesy Chris Perry, NASA

An ATREX rocket lifts off from NASA's Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia Tuesday morning. The first rocket launched at 4:58 a.m. ET. Each subsequent rocket then took off 80 seconds apart.

(Also see related pictures: "NASA's New Rocket—And 4 'Lost Launchers.'")

Two of the rockets released their tracers over the Wallops facility, while the other three created clouds in a line over the open Atlantic. The multirocket experiment allowed scientists to track the jet stream winds hundreds of miles out—the farthest rocket made it from the U.S. East Coast halfway to Bermuda (map), NASA says.

Published March 27, 2012

Rocket Fireworks

Photograph courtesy Brea Reeves, NASA

Rocket plumes and chemical tracers glow like fireworks during the ATREX launch Tuesday morning.

For the experiment, NASA had cameras snapping from coastal facilities at Wallops, in New Jersey, and in North Carolina.

The launches and the rocket-created clouds were also reportedly seen as far south as Wilmington, North Carolina; west to Charlestown, West Virginia; and as far north as Buffalo, New York, NASA says.

(Find out how sounding rockets are also being used to study auroras.)

Published March 27, 2012

Cloudy Morning

Photograph courtesy James E. Mason-Foley, NASA

One of the ATREX clouds, as seen by a NASA camera. Each cloud lasted for about 20 minutes, giving mission scientists time to track the rocket-made clouds and measure how quickly they moved away from each other.

Researchers will now use the collected data to model the kind of turbulence that exists in the upper jet stream. (Related: "Airline Passengers, Relax: Turbulence Detectors Are on the Way.")

Three-dimensional turbulence, for instance, is similar to what's seen swirling in rivers and gusting in surface winds. This kind of mixing would mean that Earth's high-level winds are governed by laws of motion similar to those that create small-scale waves in water, NASA says.

But it's also possible the high winds are ruled by two-dimensional turbulence, supporting a model based on faster, more coherent streams of air.

Published March 27, 2012

Starry Show

Photograph by Jeffrey Berkes, My Shot

The ATREX clouds lighted up the predawn skies as far away as West Chester, Pennsylvania, as seen in a shot taken by resident Jeffrey Berkes, about 180 miles (290 kilometers) from the launch site.

(Related: "Planes Create Weird Clouds—And Snow, Rain Fall Out.")

"Once the chemical tracers from the rockets were released, the view was amazing," observer Bryan Lauber of Frenchtown, New Jersey, told Spaceweather.com.

"The tracers were extremely bright and seemed to just fall out of the sky!"

Published March 27, 2012

Next: New Cloud Type Discovered? >>

Photograph courtesy Jane Wiggins

Published March 27, 2012