Sounding Rockets | NASA For 40 years, Sounding Rockets program inject #Aluminium #Barium #Lithium into the atmosphere 🚀
Tracers - Clouds and Trails 🚀
First used with sounding rockets flown in the 1950’s, scientific research with experiments which inject vapor tracers in the upper atmosphere have greatly aided our understanding of our planet’s near-space environment. These materials make visible the naturally occurring flows of ionized and neutral particles either by luminescing at distinct wavelengths in the visible and infrared part of the spectrum or by scattering sunlight.
The type of vapor selected to create these colorful clouds and trails depends on the purpose of the investigation, the local time, and the altitude under study. Commonly used vapors that are released in space are:
- Tri-methyl aluminum (TMA),
- Lithium
- Barium
Tri-methyl aluminum (TMA)
Image of luminous vapor trail of tri-methyl aluminum (TMA) reveals neutral winds, shears, gravity waves, and instabilities in the high-latitude, upper atmosphere.
Credits: NASA
Tri-methyl aluminum reacts with oxygen and produces chemi-luminescence when exposed to the atmosphere. The products of the reaction are aluminum oxide, carbon dioxide, and water vapor, which also occur naturally in the atmosphere. TMA releases are most often used to study the neutral winds in the lower ionosphere at night at altitudes of 100 miles (160 kilometers) or less.
Lithium
Image of a daytime lithium trail near 68 miles/110 kilometers altitude from a sounding rocket launched from Wallops Island, Virginia, in July 2013.
Credits: NASA
Barium
Image of cloud in the upper left hand part of the image is due to a barium release. The purple-red part is the ionized component which has become elongated along the Earth’s magnetic field lines. The purple-blue cloud that surrounds the red ionized barium is a combination of the neutral barium and strontium. The blue and white trail in the lower portion of the image is from a TMA vapor trail that reveals the neutral wind trails as a function of altitude.
Credits: NASA
Sounding Rockets | NASA https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/sounding-rockets/index.html
This explains that...
