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" Ben Longmier saw his first aurora in Wisconsin when he was 10 years old. &amp;quot;I wasn&amp;#039;t prepared for how dynamic and beautiful they were,&amp;quot; he says.  He saw the phenomenon again this month in Alaska, but this time he wasn&amp;#039;t just looking at it from the ground. He got an up-close look thanks to some high-tech cameras and a weather balloon, capturing the view from inside the aurora. Longmier is a rocket scientist with Ad Astra, a company that is building a plasma rocket that might eventually help us to explore new planets. &amp;quot;We&amp;#039;re developing the next generation of rockets for space travel,&amp;quot; Longmier says. &amp;quot;We hope that one day the R&amp;amp;amp;D that we&amp;#039;re doing will lead to human transport to Mars.&amp;quot; Lately, though, Longmier has been spending his vacation days in Alaska, launching not rockets but rather more than 20 high-altitude weather balloons. The balloons traveled up to about 30 km (18.6 miles), slightly below the aurora borealis, carrying a specially designed payload built by graduate students at Texas A&amp;amp;amp;M. The payload included GoPros, the small, durable, wearable cameras built to shoot in extreme situations. The GoPro company helped Longmier to customize the cameras for capturing the aurora. They removed the filter that normally cuts out infrared and ultraviolet light, and modified the firmware to take quick 1-second exposures of the aurora. &amp;quot;We were able to get some stunning images of the aurora from the edge of space&amp;quot; Longmier says.  The aurora is caused by the collision of the solar wind (plasma emitted by the sun) with the outer layers of our atmosphere. When the charged particles interact with the oxygen and nitrogen atoms in the upper atmosphere, colors form. Excited oxygen shows up as red at the top of the aurora, but deeper into the atmosphere, where the air molecules are closer together, oxygen releases the familiar green light. Even lower into the atmosphere, at the bottom of particularly active auroras, nitrogen releases a bluish or purple light.      Longmier and colleagues hope that, in addition to creating cool visuals, their project will give them some new insights into the physics of the aurora. For example, the images they collect showing how the aurora behaves could help inform the design of a plasma sensor sensitive enough to measure conductivity in the upper atmosphere, where electrical charges are measured in nanoamps, or 1 billionth of an amp. &amp;quot;Whenever you measure 1 billionth of anything, it&amp;#039;s really tricky to do,&amp;quot; Longmier says.  The launches were part of a program called Project Aether that Longmier started as a post-doc three years ago, intended to give students a chance to design experiments for near-space environments. For the aurora experiment, the team of Longmier, several graduate and undergraduate students, and high school teachers wanted to try to get HD footage and pictures of the aurora simultaneously from three different perspectives, from the ground, the balloon, and the International Space Station. So Longmier had to time the launches to coincide with when the space station was in the vicinity. &amp;quot;The space station doesn&amp;#039;t pass overhead but it does come within 800 miles on the ground track,&amp;quot; he says. But it wasn&amp;#039;t easy to get the timing right. &amp;quot;During the first 10 days we were up here we got nothing. The electronics were freezing, the wind was wrong. The sort of saving grace was the students were completely enamored by what they were doing&amp;quot; Longmier says. Then, on a recent Thursday night, things finally started going in the right direction. The wind was calm, the skies were clear, and the aurora was out in full force. &amp;quot;We got six balloons launched which had the opportunity to get really good results&amp;quot; Longmier says. The team then flew by helicopter into the roadless Alaskan wilderness to recover the equipment (they also used snowshoes, dogsleds, and snowmobiles while recovering other balloons). Project Aether has launched hundreds of balloons carrying all kinds of scientific experiments, from graduate level to middle school. &amp;quot;We&amp;#039;ve done middle school experiments where they fly Peeps into space&amp;quot; Longmier says. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s a nice way to do spacecraft measurements and spacecraft-like design, without building at the million-dollar level.&amp;quot;  And most important, he says, it gets students excited about science. Longmier plans to expand Project Aether in the next year, helping educators around the country launch their own weather balloons from regional centers. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.popularmechanics.com/space/deep-space/a7621/the-view-from-inside-an-aurora-8334969/>