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.The rapid cooldown, from a starting temperature of about –45° Celsius, suggests the water vapor released by the rocket not only provided the H2O to make ice crystals, but also actively cooled the air to trigger cloud formation.
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.The rapid cooldown, from a starting temperature of about –45° Celsius, suggests the water vapor released by the rocket not only provided the H2O to make ice crystals, but also actively cooled the air to trigger cloud formation.
