Latest Polar Mesospheric Clouds 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...

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...

The STPSat-1, built for the Department of Defense (DoD) Space Test Program (STP) and operated by the DoD STP for the first year then transitioned to NRL for the last 16 months, was decommissioned on October 7th after completing almost 2 ½ years of successful on-orbit operation. The satellite's two payloads, both designed and built by the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL), provided unique measurements of middle atmospheric hydroxyl, polar mesospheric clouds and the low latitude ionosphere.The...

A NASA rocket launched to study clouds spooked dozens of people along the U.S. East Coast, some worried about aliens landing, officials said.Exhaust particles from the rocket launched Saturday night at Wallops Flight Center in Virginia illuminated the sky with a cone-shape light that could be seen as far north as Massachusetts, NASA spokesman Keith Koehler said.CNN affiliate stations and NASA officials reported dozens of calls from people who saw the light, including some worried about...

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...

The Naval Research Laboratory's Spatial Heterodyne Imager for Mesospheric Radicals (SHIMMER) has successfully observed a second northern season of Polar Mesospheric Clouds (PMCs), which are the Earth's highest clouds. This successful observation fulfills the primary goal of the Space Test Program Satellite-1 (STPSat-1) Extended Mission.SHIMMER was originally launched as the primary payload of STPSat-1 on March 8, 2007, with the objective to demonstrate the novel optical technique of Spatial...

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...