NASA rocket to launch Wednesday
A NASA Terrier-Black Brant research rocket will lift off from White Sands Missile Range early tomorrow morning. It had been scheduled to launch on Monday, but because of weather it was postponed.
The rocket is carrying an experiment to study ionization in space just beyond Earth’s atmosphere.
It’s being sponsored by the Department of Defense’s Space Test Program located at Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque, NM.
It is designed to reach an altitude of more than 100 miles and will release a small amount of vapor into the near-vacuum of space to study processes responsible for the formation of the Earth’s ionosphere.
The sun will illuminate the vapor, and may cause colorful clouds at dawn over Southern New Mexico. A variety of measurements of the ionosphere will be taken by ground stations across the southwest. Data on day to day fluctuations in the ionosphere, due to ionospheric disturbances, will also be gathered. The data collected from this experiment will be used to develop enhanced models of ionospheric disturbances in near-Earth space and their effects on modern technologies.
