Night skies over the weekend erupted with vivid colors and awed people all around the globe as the solar wind from a severe geomagnetic storm produced by our sun entered Earth’s upper atmosphere and created auroral displays. The sun’s activity was closely monitored and the storm’s effects reported multiple times over the weekend by the […]
ANCHORAGE, Alaska – The Coast Guard rescued 18 people from a passenger vessel that ran aground near the Columbia Glacier Thursday. At 4:35 p.m., Coast Guard Sector Anchorage command center watchstanders overheard the ferry Aurora communicating with a vessel in distress. The watchstanders relayed communications through the crew of the Aurora and determined that Lu-Lu Belle, a 75-foot glacier tour boat, had run […]
Two sounding rockets are scheduled to launch from Poker Flat Research Range just minutes apart in an experiment aimed at learning how energy is transferred and dissipated during auroral displays. The findings could increase the understanding of factors affecting satellites in low Earth orbit. The NASA-funded Ion-Neutral Coupling during Active Aurora experiment could launch from […]
A NASA Black Brant IX sounding rocket soared high out of Poker Flat Research Range north of Fairbanks at 2:27 a.m. Saturday to learn more about pulsating aurora. The Loss through Auroral Microburst Pulsations, or LAMP, experiment seeks to determine whether the pulsating aurora is connected to another phenomenon called microbursts, higher-energy electrons from the Earth’s magnetosphere driven […]