14 DAY TRIAL // Scientists at the Poker Flat Research Range, in Poker Flat, Alaska, will be keeping their eyes on the night sky tomorrow, January 24, searching for the right conditions to launch a new sounding rocket into Earth's atmosphere. Their mission is to gain new data by analyzing the heart of northern lights events.
This time of the year is excellent for these types of observations, but researchers are not particularly interesting in analyzing the outskirt of auroras. Rather, they want to launch their rocket right inside the famously-beautiful curls that some auroras produce as they stretch across the sky.
The leader of the science team is researcher Marilia Samara from the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI), in San Antonio, Texas. She will decide when it is time to launch the sounding rocket on its 10-minute flight through our planet's upper atmosphere.
Samara holds an appointment as the principal investigator of the Ground-to-Rocket Electron-Electrodynamics Correlative Experiment (GREECE), a research initiative funded by NASA. The main goal in this project is figuring out how and why auroral curls form.
More data on this topic could lead to a deeper understanding of the phenomena spawned by the interactions between electrically-charged solar particles and Earth's magnetosphere, the shield that protects us from the harmful effects of space radiations.
“Our overarching goal is to study the transfer of energy from the sun to Earth. We target a particular manifestation of that connection: the aurora,” Samara explains, adding that the GREECE experiment consists of the sounding rocket and a series of ground-based imagers that can track aurora evolutions.
“Auroral curls are visible from the ground with high-resolution imaging. And we can infer from those observations what's happening farther out. But to truly understand the physics we need to take measurements in the aurora itself,” the investigator concludes.
The GREECE initiative was made possible by a collaboration between the University of Alaska in Fairbanks, which operates the PFRR, the NASA Wallops Flight Facility team managing the sounding rocket, the University of California in Berkeley team providing aurora measurements and the SwRI group that developed the ground-based imaging system.