The auroras have fascinated those who have observed them for millennia, but they continue to hold all kinds of mysteries. despite current sensors. In order to better understand your blinks and pulses, NASA will fly directly to them from the region of the United States where they appear most frequently.
Meanwhile, in Alaska. Although almost all of America’s space activity occurs in warm Florida, NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center has everything ready to launch a sounding rocket from Alaska.
Delayed on numerous occasions due to bad weather (today they expect snowfall and tomorrow, minimum temperatures of -28 ºC), the launch is scheduled for this week from Poker Flat Research Camp from Fairbanks.
A flight to the auroras. The mission is called Ground Imaging to Rocket investigation of Auroral Fast Features (whose acronym is “GIRAFF”but I don’t know who they’re trying to fool, we all know they put the acronym first). The objective is to fly, with separate sounding rockets, to two subtypes of northern lights:
- Fast-pulsing aurorae, which flicker in a rhythmic pattern of pulsations every second, are related to a type of electromagnetic waves in the magnetosphere called Alfvén waves.
- Flickering auroras, whose variability is slower and more irregular, and are characterized by flickers in the sky that appear to move or shift according to the flow of charged particles in the magnetosphere
Aboard a modified missile. For this mission, NASA will use Black Brant XI sounding rocketswhose first stage is derived from the US Talos naval missile. With three stages of solid fuel, the small rocket is capable of launching a payload of up to 600 kg to a height of 250 kilometers.
The GIRAFF mission rockets are equipped with instruments to measure the processes responsible for creating the optical variations in auroras, hypnotic movements observable from Earth that occur at relatively high frequencies of up to 15 Hz or more.
The GIRAFF mission. NASA researchers want to understand why some auroras flicker, others pulse, and others appear to have holes. This research focuses on two specific energy coupling mechanisms with such saccharine names as low-altitude electromagnetic ion cyclotron wave-particle interactions and chorus wave modulation in the equatorial magnetosphere.
To better understand the mechanisms of these interactions, what better than to fly directly into a flickering aurora and a fast pulsating aurora with two identical rockets? A second mission will launch two more rockets into the dark spots or “holes” of the auroras to better study this other phenomenon.
Images | NASA/Lee Wingfield/Sebastian Saarloos
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