A two-stage NASA sounding rocket shot skyward from Poker Flat Research Range at 4:20 a.m. Friday as part of a long-running project to learn more about aurora-produced nitric oxide in the upper atmosphere. Nitric oxide, a gas, can travel to lower atmospheric levels, where it can damage Earth’s protective ozone layer. The Polar Night Nitric […]
The 2026 Poker Flat Research Range launch season opened this week with the first of three missions studying the aurora and the upper atmosphere. The first mission, PolarNOx, hadits initial launch opportunity at 4:20 a.m. Friday morning. Crews arrived late Thursday at Poker Flat, which is owned by the University of Alaska Fairbanks Geophysical Institute. […]
Biological matter in water from Northern Russia is running into Arctic basin, and creating more clouds Organic matter carried in rivers to the Russian part of the Arctic Ocean may be creating more clouds and keeping the region cooler, a new study has found. In a new paper published in Communications Earth & Environment, an international […]
A team led by University of Washington astronomers has discovered the fastest-ever spinning asteroid with a diameter over half a kilometer. The asteroid — found while analyzing data from the NSF–DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory and dubbed 2025 MN45 — is 0.4 miles in diameter and completes a full rotation every 1.88 minutes. The study […]