Forget tracer bullets – NASA now has tracer rockets

Julian Richards, deputy online editor

(Image: NASA)

Blowing these smoke rings at the edge of space took some pretty impressive rocketry in the small hours of this morning. A successful rocket launch is never to be taken for granted, so pulling off five of them in as many minutes is something to crow about. That's what NASA has been doing after its five suborbital sounding rockets lifted off at 80-second intervals from the agency's Wallops Flight Facility, Virginia, beginning at 4.58?am EDT.

The job of the Anomalous Transport Rocket Experiment (ATREX) was to reveal the winds of the high-altitude jet stream 100 kilometres up by releasing the white tracer chemical shown in the photo above. Not to be confused with the lower jet stream, which can bring "blocking events" causing harsh winters at the surface, these winds blow from middle latitudes towards the poles at 500 kilometres per hour.

Two of the rockets also carried instruments to measure atmospheric pressure and temperature. Strong electrical currents also flow at this level of the ionosphere, so what goes on up there has serious implications for satellites and radio communications.

Source: http://feeds.newscientist.com/c/749/f/10897/s/1dd70f51/l/0L0Snewscientist0N0Cblogs0Cshortsharpscience0C20A120C0A30Cfive0Erockets0Elaunched0Ein0Efive0Bhtml0DDCMP0FOTC0Erss0Gnsref0Fonline0Enews/story01.htm

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