NASA Launching 5 Rockets to Light Up US East Coast Sky Tonight

The red dots over the water show where the five rockets of NASA's ATREX mission will deploy chemical tracers to watch how super-fast winds move some 60 miles up in the atmosphere. Three cameras at different sites will track the cloud tracers.

A quintuple rocket launch promises to put on a spectacular, but brief, overnight light show of luminescent vapor trails in the skies above the U.S. East Coast tonight, weather permitting. The sky display may puzzle and amaze some unsuspecting observers, so before you make that phone call to your local news or police, here is why this is happening and when you may see it.

The bright phenomenon will be caused by NASA's Anomalous Transport Rocket Experiment (ATREX), which will launch five chemical-bearing suborbital rockets in about five minutes to test the flow of winds and electrical currents at high altitudes. The rockets will blast off from NASA's Wallops Flight Facility on Wallops Island, Va., on the Atlantic coast during a window that opens tonight at midnight EDT (0400 GMT) and closes at 1:30 a.m. EDT Thursday (0530 GMT).

As part of the mission, the five rockets will each release a chemical tracer that should inscribe brilliant milky white trails in the nighttime sky and allow scientists and the general public to actually "see" high-altitude winds at the edge of space, according to a NASA description.  

Midnight launch lights

If all goes well, NASA intends to photograph the trails from three different sites: Wallops Island, southern New Jersey and the outer banks of North Carolina. Should weather conditions be unfavorable, the firings will be delayed to another night, with alternate launch dates available between March 16 and April 3.

Three different types of sounding rockets will be used to create the five cloud trails: two Terrier Improved Malemutes, two Terrier Improved Orions and one Terrier Oriole. These small rockets are powerful enough to launch instruments off the planet on short flights, but not strong enough to reach orbit and circle the Earth. [Photos: NASA's ATREX Rocket Barrage Mission]

Each rocket will eject a stream of the chemical trimethyl aluminum (TMA) which will be illuminated at high altitudes by the sun (which will be below the local horizon at ground level). Initially, the clouds are expected to glow in  reddish hues, then quickly turn to white, They could persist in the sky for as long as 20 minutes before fading completely away.

The ATREX project is aimed at gathering information to better understand the processes responsible for the high-altitude jet stream winds located 60 to 65 miles (97 to 105 kilometers) above the surface of the Earth. 

That works out to a potential viewing radius of up to 450 miles (725 km), suggesting that the resultant cloud trails might be glimpsed from perhaps as far north as southern Vermont and New Hampshire, as far south as the border of coastal North and South Carolina and as far west as central West Virginia. 

The key to making a sighting is to have a clear, unobstructed view of the night sky horizon in the direction of Wallops Island. For example, a viewer in Raleigh, N.C. should look toward the northeast; in Providence, R.I., observers should face southwest; in Philadelphia, Pa., the view will be toward the southeast.

A gusty jet stream

Looking up along the trajectory from the ground, such trails often appear tangled in complex ways, sometimes resembling a corkscrew shape. Their distorted shape provides scientists with precise data on wind speeds and directions at various levels of the upper atmosphere. The jet stream between 60 to 65 miles above the Earth's surface is much higher than the one commonly reported in weather forecasts.

The winds found in this upper jet stream typically have speeds of 200 mph to well over 300 mph and create rapid transport from the Earth's mid-latitudes to the polar regions. This jet stream is located in the same region where strong electrical currents occur in the ionosphere. It is therefore a region with a lot of electrical turbulence, of the type that can adversely affect satellite and radio communications.

In addition to the cloud tracer experiment, 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. [Video: How NASA's ATREX Rocket Missions Work]

How to watch

There are several ways to watch NASA's ATREX mission launch overnight:

NASA's Wallops Flight Facility Visitor's Center will open at 10 p.m. EDT tonight for local launch viewers. The center is located on VA 175 near Chincoteague Island, Va. Phone: (757) 824-2298 or 824-1344

NASA will also provide a live webcast of the launch here: http://sites.wff.nasa.gov/webcast

NASA updates on the mission are also available via Twitter @NASA_Wallops and on the launch center's Facebook page.

"We're Being Invaded!"

NASA used to conduct ion cloud experiments from Wallops Island much more frequently during the 1960s, '70s and '80s, usually in the predawn hours when most people were asleep. Along with trimethyl aluminum, other chemicals such as barium and triethylborane were used, often creating rather exotic colors of red, green and purple.

When such launches took place during convenient evening hours they usually took people by surprise. In March 1967, when three clouds were released at around 7 p.m., they were followed by countless numbers of people all along the East Coast calling newspapers and police stations, asking for explanations of the strange sightings. 

One man described the rocket residue as "red balls of fire" at the time.

In January 1975, a barium cloud was released at around 5:30 p.m. in the evening. As luck would have it, the town of Riverhead, N.Y. was hit by a power outage at the very same time that the cloud appeared in the sky. 

This resulted in a panic among the local residents who believed that the cloud had something to do with the loss of their power. According to accounts, one man called the local police station and shouted: "We’re being invaded!  I can see the spaceship in the sky right now ... it's glowing with a greenish color and expanding as it’s draining us of our electric power!"

If you snap an amazing photo of the glowing clouds released by NASA's ATREX rockets, or any other sky object, and would like to share them with SPACE.com for a story or gallery, please contact managing editor Tariq Malik at: tmalik@space.com.

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Angry Birds Space: NASA announcement

 

The FIRST ever game announcement and gameplay footage from space: http://angrybirds.com/space. Brought to you by NASA and Don Pettit from the ISS.

Angry Birds Space will be available from March 22

 

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Track NASA's Falling, 6.5-Ton Satellite in Real-Time

An artist's concept of the Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite (UARS) satellite in space. The 6 1/2-ton satellite was deployed from space shuttle Discovery in 1991 and decommissioned in December 2005.

In a matter of days, the sky will actually be falling. 

 

A defunct NASA atmosphere-monitoring satellite the size of a small bus is set to plunge to Earth somewhere between Thursday and Saturday -- and the space agency's scientists say there's no way to precisely determine where it will crash, be it Africa or America, the Pacific Ocean or Pacific Heights.

But thanks to a neat widget built exclusively for FoxNews.com by the satellite-tracking website N2YO.com, you can watch the UARS satellite as it courses through the heavens -- see the embedded module below

Pinpointing where and when hurtling space debris will strike is an imprecise science. To calculate the orbit, N2YO.com runs information from the U.S. Air Force Space Command through a series of algorithms, and overlays it on mapping data from Google. 

For now, scientists predict the earliest it will hit is Thursday U.S. time, the latest Saturday. The strike zone covers most of Earth.

Not that citizens need to take cover. The satellite will break into pieces, and NASA put the chances that somebody somewhere will get hurt at just 1-in-3,200 -- low enough that some people are making a game of the whole thing.

One Irish company is even allowing people to gamble on the crash site. Paddy Power, Ireland's largest bookmaker, has placed the odds that the satellite will crash in the Pacific Ocean at 8/11, followed by the Atlantic at 2/1.

“This is an absolute lottery," a spokesman for the site said. "It really could land anywhere, but I think it would be best for everyone if the satellite went for a dip.”

As far as anyone knows, falling space debris has never injured anyone. Nor has significant property damage been reported. That's because most of the planet is covered in water and there are vast regions of empty land.

If you do come across what you suspect is a satellite piece, NASA doesn't want you to pick it up. The space agency says there are no toxic chemicals present, but there could be sharp edges. Also, it's government property. It's against the law to keep it as a souvenir or sell it on eBay. NASA's advice is to report it to the police.

The 20-year-old research satellite is expected to break into more than 100 pieces as it enters the atmosphere, most of it burning up. Twenty-six of the heaviest metal parts are expected to reach Earth, the biggest chunk weighing about 300 pounds (136 kilograms). The debris could be scattered over an area about 500 miles (800 kilometers) long.

Due to heavy demand, the may take several minutes to load. 

Jonathan McDowell, for one, isn't worried. He is in the potential strike zone -- along with most of the world's 7 billion citizens. McDowell is with the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

"There's stuff that's heavy that falls out of the sky almost every year," McDowell says. So far this year, he noted, two massive Russian rocket stages have taken the plunge.

As for the odds of the satellite hitting someone, "it's a small chance. We take much bigger chances all the time in our lives," McDowell says. "So I'm not putting my tin helmet on or hiding under a rock."

All told, 1,200 pounds (544 kilograms) of wreckage is expected to smack down -- the heaviest pieces made of titanium, stainless steel or beryllium. That represents just one-tenth the mass of the satellite, which stretches 35 feet (10.7 meters) long and 15 feet (4.6 meters) in diameter.

The strike zone straddles all points between latitudes 57 degrees north and 57 degrees south. That's as far north as Edmonton and Alberta, Canada, and Aberdeen, Scotland, and as far south as Cape Horn, the southernmost tip of South America. Every continent but Antarctica is in the crosshairs.

Back when UARS, the Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite, was launched to study the ozone layer in 1991, NASA didn't always pay attention to the "what goes up must come down" rule. Nowadays, satellites must be designed either to burn up on re-entering the atmosphere or to have enough fuel to be steered into a watery grave or up into a higher, long-term orbit.

The $740 million UARS was decommissioned in 2005, after NASA lowered its orbit with the little remaining fuel on board. NASA didn't want to keep it up longer than necessary, for fear of a collision or an exploding fuel tank, either of which would have left a lot of space litter.

If it happens in darkness, it should be visible.

"If someone is lucky enough to be near the re-entry at nighttime, they'll get quite a show," says Matney, who works at Johnson Space Center in Houston, also in the potential strike zone.

Space junk in general is on the rise, much of it destroyed or broken satellites and chunks of used rockets. More than 20,000 manmade objects at least 4 inches (10.2 centimeters) in diameter are being tracked in orbit.

It's mostly a threat to astronauts in space, rather than people on Earth. In June, the six residents of the International Space Station took shelter in their docked Soyuz lifeboats because of passing debris. The unidentified object came within 1,100 feet (335.2 meters) of the complex, the closest call yet.

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NASA Discovers 'Tatooine' Planet Orbiting Two Suns

For the first-time, NASA has discovered a planet orbiting two suns, 200 light years from Earth.

The official name of the new planet is Kepler 16b, but astronomers are already referring to it informally as Tatooine, after the home planet of Luke and Anakin Skywalker in the George Lucas “Star Wars” movies, which also had two suns. “Reality has finally caught up with science fiction,” said Alan P. Boss of the Carnegie Institution, a member of the research team.

The planet is not a desert planet like Tatooine, however. It's a gas giant about the size of Saturn, very cold, with wide variances in temperature because its suns move back and forth constantly.

Said Laurance Doyle of the SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif., who led the discovery team: “This is a direct detection; it removes all doubt."

Watch Doyle explain the discovery and see a video of the system,

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