NASA Rocket Barrage Will Light Up Mid-Atlantic Coast 69
coondoggie writes "NASA will this week detail a mission where it will launch five rockets in five minutes from its Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia that will light up the night sky for millions of folks in a swath between New York City and about Wilmington, NC. The five rocket blasts, which could occur between March 14 and April 4, are part of what the space agency calls the Anomalous Transport Rocket Experiment (ATREX), a Heliophysics sounding rocket mission that aims to gather data needed to better understand the high-altitude jet stream located 60 to 65 miles above the surface of the Earth, NASA said."
NASA will be hosting a teleconference at 1PM EST on Wednesday to discuss the mission. They also have brief PDF descriptions of the rockets involved: Terrier-Improved Orion, Terrier Oriole, and Terrier Malemute.
Re:Something to feed the conspiracy folks (Score:4, Informative)
These rockets will come down (see the graphic in the two first links in the summary), so barrage isn't as mal placé as you think.
Re:Research? Sure. (Score:5, Informative)
These are sounding rockets.
The Orion is a single stage sounding rocket which will achieve an altitude of 60 km with a 250 lb payload or 90 km with a 75 lb payload.
The Terrier-Malemute is a two-stage, solid fuel rocket consisting of a Terrier 1st stage and a Malemute 2nd stage. It is capable of lifting a 200 lb payload to an apogee of approximately 700 km or a 500 lb payload to approximately 400 km.
The The Terrier-Improved Orion consists of a Terrier 1st stage and an "improved" Orion second stage. This vehicle is capable of achieving an altitude of 75 km with an 800 lb payload and 225 km with a 200 lb payload.
(source: http://sites.wff.nasa.gov/mpl/srockets.html [nasa.gov])
To be compared to the LGM-30G Minuteman-III which is a three-stage, solid fuel rocket capable of lifting an approximately 600 lbs warhead to over 1100 km. We have 450 of these more or less ready to launch.
(source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGM-30G_Minuteman-III [wikipedia.org] and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W87 [wikipedia.org])
In short, the Chinese already know we have "the capability of rapidly launching a barrage of orbit-capable warheads", and either way, these rockets aren't demonstrating anything of the sort.
Re:NASA isn't dead? (Score:5, Informative)
Does anyone else find it odd that NASA, whom I thought was mostly out of funding, is going to launch 5 rockets to test the jet stream?
No. First, sounding rockets, even the ones used by NASA, are cheap. I'd be surprised if the rocket launches themselves are over a million dollars apiece even with NASA prices. And NASA has a vast amount of funding. Second, atmospheric studies are part of their portfolio. So no oddness here.
Second, from the article:
According to NASA, the five rockets will release a chemical tracer that will form milky, white tracer clouds that let scientists and the public to "see" the winds in space. In addition, two of the rockets will have instrumented payloads, to measure the pressure and temperature in the atmosphere at the height of the high-speed winds.
So they're introducing a chemical tracer. Rockets do so faster, more accurately than balloons, have a great mechanism (their exhaust) for doing so, and can cut through a cross-section of the jet stream while balloons would float with the jet stream.