NASA will study the Earth’s ionosphere under its Dynamo-2 mission, for which the US Space Agency will launch two rockets.
NASA rockets to probe Earth’s ionosphere – symbolic photo
Two sounding rockets will be launched this month under NASA’s Dynamo-2 mission, which will work in conjunction with a satellite to study the giant electric current in Earth’s ionosphere. The two rockets, which will be launched on different days, together with NASA’s Ionospheric Connection Explorer (ICON) satellite, will advance our understanding of the atmospheric dynamo, the US space agency said.
About 80,000 thousand meters above Earth’s surface, where the atmosphere merges into space, a pattern of electric current in a continent-sized circuit creates an Earth-sized electric generator. The huge electric current is transferred across the planet to the ionosphere. In the ionosphere, the intense radiation of the Sun separates the electrons from their atoms, allowing electricity to flow.
Study of the ionosphere very difficult
Earth’s ionosphere is the highly dynamic region in the atmosphere where terrestrial weather from below meets space weather from above. Scott England, a space physicist and collaborator on the upcoming Dynamo-2 mission, said the probe from inside the ionosphere is actually the most difficult part because the air here is too thin for an aircraft to fly and too dense to fly a spacecraft.
One sounding rocket will be launched in ‘quiet’ conditions, while the other will be launched on a different day in ‘disturbed’ conditions. The launches will be timed so that the ICON satellite, designed to probe changes in the Earth’s ionosphere, is passing at the same time to compare the data. The sounding rocket will conduct a detailed probe in space before returning to Earth a few minutes later.
Rockets to be launched from Wallops Island
The Dynamo-2 rockets will be launched from NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility on Wallops Island, Virginia, on different days between July 6-20. Takumi Abe, a space physicist at JAXA and a Dynamo mission collaborator, said probe methods from Earth can provide us with unified data, but sounding rockets give us local and fine-grained data on the ionospheric current.
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