Beginning this evening at about 10:44 PM EDT, and lasting until almost 11 o’clock, the gaseous clouds from two of three TOMEX+ (Turbulent Oxygen Mixing Experiment) sounding rockets launched from NASA’s Wallops Island Flight Facility near Chincoteague, Virginia, were visible in the southern skies of much of the Lower Susquehanna River Watershed. From susquehannawildlife.net headquarters, we were able to see and photograph the glowing clouds created by these vapor releases. Within minutes, the contrail-like wisps were swept away by the swift thin air of the mesosphere, the area lying just below the thermosphere and the Kármán Line—the border of outer space 100 kilometers (62 miles) above sea level. According to NASA, “This mission aims to provide the clearest 3D view yet of turbulence in the region at the edge of space.”
A gas cloud released in the mesosphere by the first of three rockets launched in quick succession from Wallops Island, Virginia, on the Delmarva Peninsula. Being the uppermost layer of the atmosphere, the mesosphere functions as an energy conduit into space and can thus be very turbulent.A gaseous cloud created by a vapor tracer release from the second sounding rocket as seen from susquehannawildlife.net headquarters.Faint tracer clouds at the center of the image and in the upper right disperse in mesospheric air currents after release from two sounding rockets. The mesosphere’s thin air is responsible for creating enough friction to burn up a majority of the meteors that enter the earth’s atmosphere. A byproduct of the destruction of these meteors is atomic sodium. As part of the study, the third rocket used a laser to illuminate and excite this sodium in its area of greatest concentration, about 56 miles above sea level.
