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Mid Atlantic Rocket Launch Rescheduled to Saturday

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NASA Goddard Space Flight Center's Wallops Flight Facility, located on Virginia's Eastern Shore, was established in 1945 by the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, as a center for aeronautic research. Wallops is now NASA's principal facility for management and implementation of suborbital research programs. Image: NASA
NASA Goddard Space Flight Center’s Wallops Flight Facility, located on Virginia’s Eastern Shore, was established in 1945 by the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, as a center for aeronautical research. Wallops is now NASA’s principal facility for management and implementation of suborbital research programs. Image: NASA




NASA has announced they will attempt to launch a rocket on Saturday which could trigger a colorful glow high in the sky off of the East Coast. The rocket and a vapor trail it is creating should be visible across a broad area of the eastern U.S. Saturday night, weather permitting. Attempts earlier this week were scrubbed due to unfavorable weather conditions. Yesterday, the  launch was postponed again to provide time for inspection of the rocket after the vehicle came in contact with a launcher support during launch preparations. NASA Wallops said today more time is needed for that inspection, pushing the launch to now no earlier than 8:10pm Saturday evening.

Launching from their Wallops Flight Facility on the coast of Virginia, NASA is hoping to kick-off the KiNETic-scale energy and momentum transport eXperiment, known as KiNeT-X for short. A 4-stage Black Brant XII rocket will be launched no earlier Saturday night. A 40-minute launch window is open for the rocket to lift-off from; if the rocket fails to launch for any reason, they will attempt it again Sunday evening, May 16.

A four-stage Black Brant XII sounding rocket will be used in the NASA experiment this weekend. Image: NASA
For the fifth consecutive day, conditions weren’t perfect for launch of a rocket carrying an experiment from the spaceport in Virginia. Image: NASA

 

The purpose of this rocket launch is to study a fundamental problem in space plasmas: how are energy and momentum transported between different regions of space that are magnetically connected?

At roughly 9 minutes and 30 seconds after launch at an altitude of about 217-249 miles about 540-560 miles downrange from the Wallops facility and just north of Bermuda,  barium vapor will be released into the atmosphere. When this happens, two green-violet clouds could be visible in the sky for about 30 seconds.

The rocket could be visible across much of the eastern U.S. Saturday evening if the weather cooperates. Each band shows how many seconds after launch the rocket should be visible in the eastern sky. Image: NASA
The rocket could be visible across much of the eastern U.S. Monday  evening if the weather cooperates. Each band shows how many seconds after launch the rocket should be visible in the eastern sky. Image: NASA




According to NASA, 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.  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.  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.

NASA says the barium vapor being released is not harmful to the environment or public health.

Unlike for larger launches, such as the Cygnus cargo craft launches to the International Space Station, the NASA Visitor Center at Wallops will not be open for launch viewing of this rocket. The facility remains closed to visitors  due to the ongoing global pandemic.