A few months ago a Shuttle launch made one of these clouds.
Posted on 09/15/2009 6:25:43 PM PDT by Free ThinkerNY
A rocket experiment set to launch Tuesday aims to create artificial clouds at the outermost layers of Earth's atmosphere.
The project, called the Charged Aerosol Release Experiment (CARE), plans to trigger cloud formation around the rocket's exhaust particles. The clouds are intended to simulate naturally-occurring phenomena called noctilucent clouds, which are the highest clouds in the atmosphere.
"This is really essentially at the boundary of space," said Wayne Scales, a scientist at Virginia Tech who will use computer models to study the physics of the artificial dust cloud as it's released. "Nothing like this has been done before and that's why everybody's really excited about it."
The experiment is the first attempt to create artificial noctilucent clouds. A previous spacecraft, called Aeronomy of Ice in the Mesosphere (AIM), launched in 2007 to observe the natural clouds from space.
CARE is slated to launch Tuesday between 7:30 and 7:57 p.m. EDT (2330 and 2357 GMT) from NASA's Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia.
Noctilucent means "night shining" in Latin. Although difficult to spot with the naked eye, the clouds are best visible when Earth's surface is in darkness and sunlight from below the horizon illuminates the high-altitude clouds.
These clouds, also known as polar mesospheric clouds, are made of ice crystals. The natural ones tend to hover around 50 to 55 miles (80 to 90 km) above the Earth. CARE will release its dust particles a bit higher than that, then let them settle back down to a lower altitude.
"What the CARE experiment hopes to do is to create an artificial dust layer," Scales told SPACE.com. "Hopefully it's a creation in a controlled sense, which will allow scientists to study different aspects of it, the turbulence generated on the inside, the distribution of dust particles and such."
(Excerpt) Read more at livescience.com ...
If it works, Obambi’s science advisor can continue to push his demented scheme (releasing sulfur-rich aerosols to combat the “greenhouse effect”).
Wonder if these will be visible.
Normally I'd say "WOW, this is kinda a cool experiment by NASA" ... but given their recent penchant for bowing towards the Global Warming™ crowd, I would put reservations on the purpose of this near-space experiment.
Color MM as 'skeptical' as to the motive for this
It doesnt pay to screw around with Mother Nature.
Yep. I'm all wee-weed up. If the dust were made of shredded HR3200 I might be more interested. I am going to make an assumption that the real intent of this experiment is to buy ourselves more time before the threat of man made global warming kills us all.
It’s just a pile of dust
from the vacuum cleaners
of a few NASA offices.
There is the scary operative phrase --- "Hopefully ...."
Wilhelm Reich, please call your office.
I remember that ad in the 70’s. It would be followed up by and Irish Spring and then maybe you can call me Ray or you can call me Jay or maybe plop plop fiz fiz oh what a relief it is.
Didn’t they used to do something like this at Wallops Island back in the early days of NASA?
Oh, wonderful, now they are experimenting with climate control, just what we need.
As in a nuclear scientist saying,"This experiment could trigger a chain reaction and destroy the world, hopefully my calculations are correct and it won't".
A few months ago a Shuttle launch made one of these clouds.
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