NASA shares fascinating pictures of the Wallops rocket launch, shows green & violet skies

Fascinating pictures of the Balck Brant XII launch conducted by NASA have been released on the internet. The launch took place at 8:44 PM EDT, Sunday, May 16th, 2021 from the Wallops Flight Facility. The rocket launch sparked stunning green and violet clouds in the night sky, which were captured well in photographs that were shared by NASA on Twitter.

NASA Wallops rocket launch space photos go viral 

NASA Wallops took to their official Twitter handle and uploaded two pictures. The post was captioned as, 'Did you see the series finale of KiNET-X last night?' In the final moments of the launch window, the Black Brant XII carrying the KiNET-X experiment launched into the night sky. The mission will help scientists explore energy transfer in space. Check out the tweet of the same below.

NASA Rocket launch pictures

The Black Brant XII, four-stage rocket, carried the KiNETic scale energy and momentum transport experiment. The KiNet-X is designed with the purpose of understanding the fundamental problem in the space plasmas and how energy and momentum are transported between different regions of space. The space and regions that are magnetically connected.

NASA explains that a part of the mission includes the release of barium vapours which formed two coloured clouds that appear as green and violet. These clouds appear over the Atlantic Ocean north of Bermuda. NASA claims that barium vapour is not harmful to public health or the environment.

As far north as Halifax, Nova Scotia, as far south as Cape Canaveral, Florida, and as far inland as Ohio, the launch and vapour clouds were recorded. A NASA Terrier-Improved Malemute sounding rocket is expected to launch from Wallops next. The time for the launch has been set for 9:15 p.m. Tuesday, May 26th. The launch window is open until 12 a.m. The launch will be visible from the mid-Atlantic area.

Solar particles migrate around the Earth's magnetic north and south poles, causing auroras to appear. Particles move through the Earth's magnetic shield and communicate with atoms and molecules of oxygen, nitrogen, and other elements, resulting in the "northern lights" or "southern lights".

Despite having observed auroras on Earth for centuries and on other planets for decades, scientists are still baffled by how energies transfer in them. In the mission summary, Peter Delamere, KiNET-X principal investigator from the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, said, "The electrons in Earth's space environment and in the solar wind have relatively low energies."

IMAGE: NASA WALLOPS TWITTER