NASA Rocket Experiment Supercharges Aurora Display Over Alaska

Just when you thought the northern lights couldn’t get any more stunning, along comes NASA to crank that dial to an 11.

The space agency blasted three sounding rockets above central and northern Alaska during an auroral substorm to study how these substorms impact the Earth’s atmosphere. The project, catchily named Auroral Waves Excited by Substorm Onset Magnetic Events (AWESOME), was led by researchers from the University of Alaska Fairbanks (UAF).

In the first display on March 25, the research team fired a 42-foot rocket over central Alaska and a 70-foot rocket over the Arctic Ocean. Both rockets released their payloads—think ion guages, magnetometers, and vapor chasers; the latter released colorful puffs of gas—during an auroral substorm. The result: a light show producing beautiful blue and purple dashes against a backdrop of green and pink auroras.

A third rocket, launched on March 29, created a much different light show thanks to a faulty payload valve. Instead of dotting the sky, there was a stunning double-ring that hung in the night sky in gradients of bright white.

“That ring was spectacular. It was extremely bright and absolutely unmissable,” Mark Conde, a space physics professor at UAF, said in a release. “Anyone who was outside at the time and looked up would have been treated to a visually, stunning and appealing display in the sky.”

Despite the last rocket’s beautiful error, the data gathered by the mission was deemed a success. The team will study the results to better understand the dynamics of auroral activity in the upper atmosphere and its potential impact on the orbits of satellite-based devices, like GPS.

​​”These launches are a great accomplishment in the effort to continue to research the impact of auroras and potentially improve space weather forecasting,” Aly Mendoza-Hill, a program executive at NASA, said.