Scientists hope the rocket will offer more insight into the source of soft X-rays, which “hurtle towards Earth from elsewhere in our galaxy,” the release said. The launch was set to visible in coastal regions from North Carolina to southern New York, weather permitting. The sounding rocket launched at midnight, according to a tweet from the Wallops facility. The NASA Visitor Center at Wallops will not be open for launch viewing.Night owls on the mid-Atlantic coast were treated to a show in the sky overnight as a NASA rocket launched from the Wallops Flight Facility on Wallops Island, Virginia. Launch status updates can be found on the Wallops Facebook and Twitter sites. Live coverage of the mission will be available on the Wallops IBM video site (previously Ustream) beginning at 7:40 p.m. The KiNET-X clouds will therefore be more difficult for the casual observer to see than some of the previous vapor missions launched from Wallops. In general, the human eye does not see violet colors very well in darkness. Because the motion of the neutral portion of the clouds is not constrained by the magnetic field lines, they spread out more quickly and become too thin to see with the naked eye much sooner than the ionized component. In the mid-Atlantic region latitudes, the field lines are inclined by about 45 degrees to the horizontal, so the violet clouds stretch out in a slanted orientation and look more like short trails than a cloud. The ionized portion of the cloud becomes tied to the magnetic field lines and diffuses parallel to the field lines but not perpendicular to it. After exposure to sunlight the vapor clouds quickly ionize and take on a violet color. Immediately after release of the vapor, the spherical clouds are a mixture of green and violet, but that phase only lasts about 30 seconds when the un-ionized component of the cloud has diffused away. The vapor will be released approximately 9 minutes and 30 seconds to around 10 minutes after launch at about 217-249 miles altitude over the Atlantic Ocean and 540-560 miles downrange from Wallops and just north of Bermuda. The mission, called the KiNETic-scale energy and momentum transport eXperiment, or KiNet-X, is designed to study a very fundamental problem in space plasmas, namely, how are energy and momentum transported between different regions of space that are magnetically connected? The barium vapor is not harmful to the environment or public health The launch may be visible, weather permitting, in much of the eastern United States from the Atlantic coast to the Mississippi River.Ī four-stage Black Brant XII rocket will be used for the mission that includes the release of barium vapor that will form two green-violet clouds that may be visible for about 30 seconds. EDT with a 40-minute launch window, Saturday, May 8. The mission is scheduled for no earlier than 8:02 p.m. WALLOPS ISLAND, Va., /PRNewswire/ - A mission to explore energy transport in space using a NASA suborbital sounding rocket launching May 8, 2021, from NASA's Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia may provide a brief light show for residents of the eastern United States and Bermuda.
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