NASA Marks Fourth of July with Double Launch

A NASA Black Brant V sounding rocket launches from the agency's Wallops Flight Facility on Wallops Island, Va., at 10:31:25 a.m. ET on July 4, 2013. 

The rocket was the first of two to launch in support of the Daytime Dynamo experiment. 

The Terrier-Improved Orion (foreground) was launched 15 seconds later.

CREDIT: NASA/Patrick Black

NASA launched two small rockets from Virgina's Eastern Shore today in an early Fourth of July fireworks display aimed to probe the electrical eddies of the Earth's upper atmosphere.

The two small rockets blasted off within 15 seconds of each other from NASA's Wallops Flight Facility on Wallops Island, Va.

The mission: to probe the global electrical current in the winds of Earth's ionosphere with instruments mounted to a Black Brant V booster and a Terrier-Improved Orion sounding rocket.

"We have liftoff of the Black Brant V & Terrier-Improved Orion, for an Independence Day fireworks show," NASA Wallops officials wrote in a Twitter post marking launch success.

The Black Brant V rocket launched at 10:31:25 a.m. EDT (1431:25 GMT), with the Terrior-Improved Orion rocket following at 10:31:40 a.m. EDT (1431:40 GMT).

NASA's Fourth of July rocket launches were part of the Daytime Dynamo mission, a joint project with the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency to study how electrical currents move in Earth's ionosphere between 30 and 600 miles (48 and 965 kilometers) above the surface.

People on Earth rely on this current in the ionosphere, called the dynamo, every day.

Radio signals are bounced off the ionosphere during broadcasts and satellite communication and navigation signals must travel through the ionosphere in order to reach the Earth.

Then the ionosphere is disturbed, these signals can be distorted, NASA officials said.

The larger Black Brant V rocket carried instruments to measure the neutral and charged particles in Earth's ionosphere, while the smaller Terrier-Improved Orion released a lithium gas compound designed to allow scientists on the ground track the electrical current wind patterns.

The two rockets were expected to reach an altitude of about 100 miles (160 kilometers), but not fly high and fast enough to orbit the Earth.

The rocket launch came after days of delays due to unfavorable weather at the Wallops launch range. Cloudy weather and high winds prevented several launch attempts, which began June 24.

It was only by coincidence that the rocket launch coincided with the annual U.S. Independence Day holiday.

"Happy Fourth of July everyone," a launch controller told the mission team shortly after liftoff. "We beat everyone by putting some rockets into the air."

Marks On Mars' Dunes - Caused By Dry Ice? - Video

NASA turned an Earth dune into a dry ice 'slip and slide' to see how downhill flow features are forming on Mars. 

In the case of dry ice, the frozen carbon dioxide interacting with the sand, created a CO2 gas pillow for the ice to ride on

Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech

Cassini Saturn Image: Icy Cloud Marks Titan's Seasonal change

Titan: Icy Cloud Marks Saturn Moon's Season

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute

New photos from NASA's Cassini spacecraft show that an icy cloud is growing over the south pole of Saturn's largest moon, Titan, hinting that a seven-year fall has taken hold at the cloudy moon's southern realm.

ESA: Mars express Auspicious orbit marks run-up to Phobos flyby

In a first, ESA’s Mars Express orbiter imaged the martian moons Phobos and Deimos together on 5 November 2009. Apart from their ‘wow’ factor, these unique images will help the HRSC team validate and refine existing orbit models of the two moons.

The images were acquired with the Super Resolution Channel (SRC) of the High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC). The camera took 130 images of the moons on 5 November at 9:14 CET in a span of 1.5 minutes at intervals of 1s, speeding up to 0.5-s intervals toward the end. The image resolution is 110 m/pixel for Phobos and 240 m/pixel for Deimos — Deimos was more than twice as far from the camera.

The Super Resolution Channel of the HRSC uses an additional lens, which has a very narrow field of view of just 0.5°, providing four times the magnification than otherwise providing four times the resolution of the HRSC colour stereo channel. Phobos, the larger of the two moons, orbits closer to the Red Planet, circling it every 7 hours and 39 minutes. It travels faster relative to Mars than the Moon relative to Earth. It was 11800 km from Mars Express when the images were taken. Deimos was 26200 kilometres away.

Credits: ESA/DLR/FU Berlin (G. Neukum)