NASA is Making Glowing Rainbow Clouds Tonight Here’s How to Watch – Futurism

In Brief NASA will artificially create colorful clouds that move in the Earth's upper atmosphere, similar to how auroras do. The purpose of the experiment is to track how particles, particularly ions, behave in that portion of the planet's atmosphere.

Seven is, in many cultures, a lucky number and NASA is hoping it could prove to be the same for them. Tonight, June 13, between 9:04 and 9:19 pm EDT, the space agency will attempt for the seventh time to launch a sounding rocket from its Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia.

Five minutes into the rockets takeoff, it will jettison 10 canisters, each about thesize of a soft drink can, which will spray minute amounts of barium, strontium, and cupric oxide into the atmosphere. This cloud-seeding process will create red and blue-green artificial clouds.

Whats it for? Well for one, tocreate colorful clouds to adorn to night sky but also as a way to study how particles move around the ionosphere. Located about 74 km (46 miles) above the surface and extending into space nearly 1,000 km (621 miles), the ionosphere is the part of the Earths upper atmosphere where charged particles from thesun turn atoms into ions.

After releasing this material in space, researchers then visually observe the subsequent movement of the vapor as it traces the motions of background environment, NASA wrote in a poston their official website. This technique is analogous to that of injecting a small, harmless dye into a river or stream, to study its currents, eddies, and other motions.

If you want to observe this perfectly harmless experiment,it will belive-streamed via the link below.

Offline, in real life,it may actually be visible along the eastern seaboard of the U.S. from New York to North Carolina, and as far inland as to Charlottesville, Virginia assuming there are clear skies. Otherwise NASA might just have cancel if lucky number seven doesnt prove lucky after all.

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NASA is Making Glowing Rainbow Clouds Tonight Here's How to Watch - Futurism