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 […]
Years of preparation by the Alaska Satellite Facility will ensure that a flood of freely available data from a NASA-India satellite mission that launched Wednesday will be easy for the global public to use. “Most of what we’ve been working on for the past eight years is preparing for NISAR,” Alaska Satellite Facility Director Wade […]
A huge flood triggered by the rapid draining of a lake beneath the Greenland ice sheet occurred with such force that it fractured the ice above and burst out across its surface. This phenomenon, observed for the first time in Greenland and detailed in research published today in the journal Nature Geoscience, sheds new light […]
Warming global climate is changing the vegetation structure of forests in the far north. It’s a trend that will continue at least through the end of this century, according to NASA researchers. The change in forest structure could absorb more of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere, or increase permafrost thawing, resulting […]