As the top portion of SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket separated from its cargo bay in space Sunday morning, cheers erupted back on earth in a conference room filled with scientists and their family members watching the launch at Hampton's Harbour Centre.

The group that filled the conference room was cheering because the live-stream showed two pieces of the Stratospheric Aerosol and Gas Experiment III, or SAGE III, that was designed and built by a team from Hampton University and NASA Langley. SAGE III is an ozone-measuring instrument traveling aboard the Falcon 9, which is bound for the International Space Station.

Dr. Charles Hill, a Hampton graduate and instrument scientist with the SAGE program, said seeing the equipment in space was a big part of the payoff of seven years of work.

He called the launch seven years of work and 30 seconds of terror.

For the scientists in Hampton, the 30 seconds of terror were actually postponed by a day; Falcon 9 was scheduled to launch from Cape Canaveral in Florida Saturday, but conditions in the atmosphere led to the postponement. Hill said the countdown clock got all the way to 13 seconds before the launch was scrubbed.

Once it reaches the space station, SAGE III will collect atmospheric data with special emphasis on the ozone layer. For each sunrise and sunset, SAGE III will look at sun, scan it and use it as a light source to probe the atmosphere and measure ozone and aerosols, according to Robert Damadeo, an algorithm scientist.

"If you look at Edvard Munch's The Scream, the sky is blood red because of residual substance in the air after a huge volcanic eruption on the island of Krakatoa," Damado said. "Same concept now you can tell how much aerosol is in the sky based on its color."

Hill called the readings from the SAGE program the gold standard in these atmospheric readings and said the data is used by scientists throughout the world to validate their research.

Ozone is important to the atmosphere because it protects the earth from ultraviolet rays, similar to sunscreen on a person's skin, Hill said. However, the ozone layer was found to be thinning and eventually a hole was discovered in the 1990s.

Since then, the layer has recovered due to a worldwide ban on Freon 12, a substance once commonly used in air conditioning units that was found responsible for ozone depletion. But Hill said it will take about 50 years for the layer to return to a comfortable level.

Dr. James Russell, co-director of Hampton University's Center for Atmospheric Science, said the SAGE program has its origins in the 1970s, putting 40 years of experience into the SAGE III project. "It's really a Langley brand," he said.

As the team members from Hampton and Langley congratulated each other on the successful launch, Hill said the next step is already lined up; work on SAGE IV will begin in about a month, and funding for the project has already been secured.

Reyes can be reached by phone at 757-247-4692. Mishkin at 757-641-6669

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Ozone-measuring instrument from NASA Langley-HU partnership launches into space - Daily Press