A two-stage NASA sounding rocket flew skyward shortly after midnight Wednesday carrying science instruments to gather data about the solar wind’s behavior. The experiment, named Dissipation, is aimed at learning how charged solar wind particles dissipate their energy in the high-latitude ionosphere-thermosphere. That region is about 62 to 186 miles above the surface and at latitudes above 65 […]
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 […]
A NASA sounding rocket soared high from a launchpad in Norway on Wednesday morning in a decades-old quest to understand the cause of a persistent dense patch of upper atmosphere on Earth’s sun-facing side. The Cusp Region Experiment-2, or C-REX-2, is headed by space physicist Mark Conde of the University of Alaska Fairbanks Geophysical Institute […]
A rocket launch gone awry on Saturday took the life of daredevil “Mad” Mike Hughes in Barstow, California. The 64-year-old stunt man turned rocket enthusiast was attempting a 5,000-foot ascent on Saturday afternoon when the launch immediately went wrong. As the rocket fired off, it hit the ladder used for climbing up to the […]