In a daring mission launched in January, NASA scientists are launching a rocket directly into one of nature’s most mesmerizing phenomena – the Northern Lights. What is their goal? Unravel the mystery of the twinkling auroras and their mysterious dark spots that appear to swallow light.
Two separate missions will launch from Alaska’s Poker Flats Research Range, targeting different types of auroral behavior that have long puzzled scientists. The purpose of these missions is to understand why some aurora twinkle like old television sets, while others form mysterious black holes.
“It looks like the flicker of an old television,” explains Robert Michell, a space physicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in charge of the GIRAFF mission. His team will study two different types of auroras: rapidly pulsating aurora, which flash several times per second, and flickering auroras, which flash up to 15 times per second.
The tranquil band of light across the northern sky is actually caused by countless tiny collisions, which glow in their wakes as electrons hit atmospheric gases. Scientists aim to trace the source of these electrons, much like investigators at crash sites.
These missions present a unique challenge – hitting moving targets in the vast Alaskan skies. “We’ll be watching the movement of these structures in all-sky cameras to try to pinpoint the timing,” Michel said. It takes about five minutes for the rocket to reach its target altitude, requiring the team to predict where the aurora will be, rather than where it will be at launch.
The second mission, led by space physicist Marilia Samara, will investigate an even stranger phenomenon – “black aurora”, where dark spots appear amid glowing lights. Recent research suggests that these dark spots may form where electrons reverse direction and escape back into space, but confirming this requires precise measurements.
“Otherwise, this would not be a black aurora, but just a lack of auroras,” Samara noted, emphasizing the importance of detecting these escaped electrons to confirm the phenomenon.
The timing and execution of these launches requires scientific precision and experienced intuition. “You do your best, but you need a certain amount of intuition and determination,” Samara explains. The teams will use ground-based cameras at the launch site and the Veneti Observatory in Alaska, about 130 miles northeast, to track the aurora’s movement.
These tasks have a larger purpose than pure scientific curiosity. Understanding these auroral behaviors helps NASA better understand the space environment around Earth, which affects spacecraft and astronauts.
The launch window will open on January 21, 2025, when these scientific detectives will take to the skies of Alaska, aiming to uncover some of nature’s most fascinating mysteries. Their findings could reshape our understanding of Earth’s interaction with space and help protect our increasingly space-dependent civilization.
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