14 DAY TRIAL // The International Space Station may only be a few hundreds of kilometers above our planet, it's actually closer than a lot of places in your country most likely, but that doesn't mean that the astronauts currently on board aren't seeing things "out of this world."
Besides the great views of Earth, like the ones that former ISS astronaut Chris Hadfield has made us familiar with, the great sunrises and sunsets, the apparent lack of gravity and so on, astronauts also get to experience or witness more mysterious phenomena.
One such phenomenon was seen last week when a strange and huge cloud appeared high above the actual atmosphere of Earth.
The cause wasn't particularly hard to understand, especially since astronauts also saw what looked like a rocket trail rising from the ground. But there were no scheduled launches known to take place at that time.
"Saw something launch into space today. Not sure what it was but the cloud it left behind was pretty amazing," astronaut Mike Hopkins first tweeted.
"An immense cloud forms outside the atmosphere after the disintegration," astronaut Luca Parmitano followed, with a clearer picture.
It turned out that Russia was testing one of its intercontinental ballistic missiles, basically to see if they still worked. The missiles went into service in the late eighties and early nineties and were only supposed to work for 10 years. Thankfully, there hasn't been much of a need for ICBMs in the past couple of decades.
That period got extended to 25 years, but even that is expiring. The Russians want to know if they can extend it even further and need to test the rockets to see if they still work.
The cloud the astronauts saw and pictured was definitely left behind by the rocket launch, likely caused by the disintegration of the second stage of the three-stage rocket.
