March 5, 2021 at 10:25 am
NASA’s Super Soaker mission was basically an extreme DIY project: To better understand how noctilucent, or night-shining clouds form, researchers made one from scratch.
One frigid, predawn morning in January 2018, researchers launched a rocket hauling a bathtub’s worth of water from Poker Flat Research Range in Chatanika, Alaska. When this rocket was 85 kilometers off the ground, its water cargo exploded spraying the upper mesosphere with a plume of vapor that froze into a cloud of ice crystals. When such high-flying hazes of ice are illuminated by sunlight from beyond the horizon after sunset, they are seen in the dark sky as shimmery noctilucent clouds (