NASA Rocket Barrage Should Provide Skywatching Treat NASA will
launch five rockets in five minutes Wednesday (March 14) to
study fast-moving winds at the edge of space, and many
skywatchers along the United States' mid-Atlantic coast will be
able to watch the show. The unmanned rocket barrage, which is
slated to blast off late Wednesday from NASA's Wallops Flight
Facility in Virginia, forms the core of the agency's Anomalous
Transport Rocket Experiment, or ATREX. The five suborbital
rockets will release chemical tracers between 50 to 90 miles (80
to 145 kilometers) up to track high-altitude winds, which can
zip around the planet at more than 300 mph (483 kph). These
tracers will create milky-white clouds that should be visible to
folks on the ground from parts of South Carolina up through New
Jersey, researchers said. "They occur in the middle of the
night, and they glow," ATREX principal investigator Miguel
Larsen, of Clemson University, told reporters March 7. "It's not
extremely bright, but it's definitely