Latest Aeronomy of Ice in the Mesosphere Stories

NASA A constant stream of space debris flows toward Earth from the rest of the solar system. Large meteors can sometimes survive the intense friction and heat upon entering Earth’s atmosphere, but by and large the meteors evaporate and reform into tiny particles that are left to whiz through the atmosphere. Such particles are so light and so ubiquitous that scientists refer to them as smoke. Tracking how this smoke swirls around Earth has implications for understanding weather and...

April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online The last space shuttle flight took place on July 8, 2011, sending Atlantis into space for its thirty-third, and final mission. This flight marked the end of a 20-year space shuttle program. As Atlantis reached a height of about 70 miles over the east coast of the U.S., it released 350 tons of water vapor exhaust. The vapor plume spread and floated on air currents high in the Earth's atmosphere, crossing through the observation paths...

When noctilucent clouds (NLCs) first appeared in the 19th century, they were a high-latitude phenomenon. You had to travel toward the poles to see their electric-blue glow. Not anymore. Just this past weekend, these beautiful, "night-shining" clouds spilled over the Canadian border into the lower United States as far south as Denver, Colorado.In recent years, a NASA spacecraft called AIM (Aeronomy of Ice in the Mesosphere) has spotted the clouds appearing ever lower in latitudes,...

High up in the sky near the poles some 50 miles above the ground, silvery blue clouds sometimes appear, shining brightly in the night. First noticed in 1885, these clouds are known as noctilucent, or "night shining," clouds. Their discovery spawned over a century of research into what conditions causes them to form and vary "“ questions that still tantalize scientists to this day. Since 2007, a NASA mission called Aeronomy of Ice in the Mesosphere (AIM) has shown that the cloud...

NASA's Aeronomy of Ice in the Mesosphere (AIM) satellite has captured five complete polar seasons of noctilucent (NLC) or "night-shining" clouds with an unprecedented horizontal resolution of 3 miles by 3 miles. Results show that the cloud season turns on and off like a "geophysical light bulb" and they reveal evidence that high altitude mesospheric "weather" may follow similar patterns as our ever-changing weather near the Earth's surface. These findings were...

GREENBELT, Md., Dec. 15 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- NASA's Aeronomy of Ice in the Mesosphere (AIM) satellite has captured five complete polar seasons of noctilucent (NLC) or "night-shining" clouds with an unprecedented horizontal resolution of 3 miles by 3 miles. Results show that the cloud season turns on and off like a "geophysical light bulb," and they reveal evidence that high altitude mesospheric "weather" may follow similar patterns as our ever-changing weather near the Earth's...

WALLOPS ISLAND, Va., Sept. 9 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- A rocket experiment that may shed light on the highest clouds in the Earth's atmosphere will be conducted Sept. 15 from NASA's Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia. (Logo: http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20081007/38461LOGO) The Charged Aerosol Release Experiment (CARE) will be conducted by the Naval Research Laboratory and the Department of Defense Space Test Program using a NASA four-stage Black Brant XII suborbital sounding...

U.S. scientists say they've made the first direct observations of biological particles in high-altitude clouds. A team of atmospheric chemists led by Kimberly Prather and Kerri Pratt of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California-San Diego sampled water droplet and ice crystal residues at high speeds while flying through clouds in the skies over Wyoming. An analysis revealed the particles were made up nearly entirely of either dust or biological material, such as...

HAMPTON, Va. -- A Hampton University professor is shedding new light on night-shining clouds that might be affected by climate change. Jim Russell is the lead scientist for the NASA-funded AIM satellite, the first to study the wispy "noctilucent" clouds, which only appear above Earth's poles.Russell, an atmospheric science professor, has found that the clouds get brighter and stretch farther as the uppermost atmosphere gets colder. He thinks that the changes might be caused by...

A NASA satellite has captured the first occurrence this summer of mysterious shiny polar clouds that form 50 miles above Earth's surface. The first observations of these "night-shining" clouds by a satellite named "AIM" which means Aeronomy of Ice in the Mesosphere, occurred above 70 degrees north latitude on May 25. People on the ground began seeing the clouds on June 6 over Northern Europe. AIM is the first satellite mission dedicated to the study of these unusual...