NASA’s rocket team will soon begin its mission to review giant, hurricane-like vortices in the upper atmosphere to grasp weather patterns that affect the entire planet.
Called The vortex experiment (VortEx), the mission will start from Andøya Space Centre in the city of Andenes in northern Norway. In keeping with the Andøya Space Center, the launch window might be between March 17 and 26.
The principal goal of the mission is to learn the way high-altitude winds produce a phenomenon often called buoyancy waves, NASA said.
What are buoyancy waves?
Buoyancy waves are large pulses of energy that drive the changes in which Earth’s atmosphere merges with outer space.
In keeping with NASA, buoyancy waves occur when a gust or disturbance suddenly pushes denser air upwards into an area of lower pressure, creating an oscillation as the atmosphere tries to balance itself.
They added that these oscillations result in waves that propagate or ripple away from the source of the interference.
“They might come from approaching storm fronts or winds hitting the mountains and sending them up,” said Gerald Lehmacher, a physics professor at Clemson University in South Carolina and principal investigator of the VortEx mission.
As buoyancy waves propagate, they may move upward and go through stable layers of the atmosphere. In this fashion, they’ll create giant vortices of air.
These whirlpools or whirlpools are believed to increase for tens of kilometers. Because of their enormous size, the vortices are too large to be measured and studied by conventional methods, NASA said.
To beat this, Lehmacher designed the VortEx to measure vortices.
How will rockets explore vortices?
In keeping with NASA, the VorEx mission will use 4 rockets that might be launched two at a time. Each pair consists of 1 high flight and one low flight, fired a number of minutes apart.
The high-flyers will measure winds and peak at an altitude of about 224 miles (360 kilometers), NASA said. The low-flyers, reaching an altitude of about 87 miles (140 kilometers), will measure the density of the air, which affects the formation of vortices.
The rockets will take measurements for a number of minutes before returning to the surface and falling into the Norwegian Sea.
The live stream of the VortEx launch might be broadcast on Andøya Space Center’s YouTube channel starting March 17 at 4:30 p.m. EST