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By NASA
5 min read
NASA Launching Rockets Into Radio-Disrupting Clouds
NASA is launching rockets from a remote Pacific island to study mysterious, high-altitude cloud-like structures that can disrupt critical communication systems. The mission, called Sporadic-E ElectroDynamics, or SEED, opens its three-week launch window from Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands on Friday, June 13.
The atmospheric features SEED is studying are known as Sporadic-E layers, and they create a host of problems for radio communications. When they are present, air traffic controllers and marine radio users may pick up signals from unusually distant regions, mistaking them for nearby sources. Military operators using radar to see beyond the horizon may detect false targets — nicknamed “ghosts” — or receive garbled signals that are tricky to decipher. Sporadic-E layers are constantly forming, moving, and dissipating, so these disruptions can be difficult to anticipate.
An animated illustration depicts Sporadic-E layers forming in the lower portions of the ionosphere, causing radio signals to reflect back to Earth before reaching higher layers of the ionosphere. NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Conceptual Image Lab Sporadic-E layers form in the ionosphere, a layer of Earth’s atmosphere that stretches from about 40 to 600 miles (60 to 1,000 kilometers) above sea level. Home to the International Space Station and most Earth-orbiting satellites, the ionosphere is also where we see the greatest impacts of space weather. Primarily driven by the Sun, space weather causes myriad problems for our communications with satellites and between ground systems. A better understanding of the ionosphere is key to keeping critical infrastructure running smoothly.
The ionosphere is named for the charged particles, or ions, that reside there. Some of these ions come from meteors, which burn up in the atmosphere and leave traces of ionized iron, magnesium, calcium, sodium, and potassium suspended in the sky. These “heavy metals” are more massive than the ionosphere’s typical residents and tend to sink to lower altitudes, below 90 miles (140 kilometers). Occasionally, they clump together to create dense clusters known as Sporadic-E layers.
The Perseids meteor shower peaks in mid-August. Meteors like these can deposit metals into Earth’s ionosphere that can help create cloud-like structures called Sporadic-E layers. NASA/Preston Dyches “These Sporadic-E layers are not visible to naked eye, and can only be seen by radars. In the radar plots, some layers appear like patchy and puffy clouds, while others spread out, similar to an overcast sky, which we call blanketing Sporadic-E layer” said Aroh Barjatya, the SEED mission’s principal investigator and a professor of engineering physics at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach, Florida. The SEED team includes scientists from Embry-Riddle, Boston College in Massachusetts, and Clemson University in South Carolina.
“There’s a lot of interest in predicting these layers and understanding their dynamics because of how they interfere with communications,” Barjatya said.
A Mystery at the Equator
Scientists can explain Sporadic-E layers when they form at midlatitudes but not when they appear close to Earth’s equator — such as near Kwajalein Atoll, where the SEED mission will launch.
In the Northern and Southern Hemispheres, Sporadic-E layers can be thought of as particle traffic jams.
Think of ions in the atmosphere as miniature cars traveling single file in lanes defined by Earth’s magnetic field lines. These lanes connect Earth end to end — emerging near the South Pole, bowing around the equator, and plunging back into the North Pole.
A conceptual animation shows Earth’s magnetic field. The blue lines radiating from Earth represent the magnetic field lines that charged particles travel along. NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Conceptual Image Lab At Earth’s midlatitudes, the field lines angle toward the ground, descending through atmospheric layers with varying wind speeds and directions. As the ions pass through these layers, they experience wind shear — turbulent gusts that cause their orderly line to clump together. These particle pileups form Sporadic-E layers.
But near the magnetic equator, this explanation doesn’t work. There, Earth’s magnetic field lines run parallel to the surface and do not intersect atmospheric layers with differing winds, so Sporadic-E layers shouldn’t form. Yet, they do — though less frequently.
“We’re launching from the closest place NASA can to the magnetic equator,” Barjatya said, “to study the physics that existing theory doesn’t fully explain.”
Taking to the Skies
To investigate, Barjatya developed SEED to study low-latitude Sporadic-E layers from the inside. The mission relies on sounding rockets — uncrewed suborbital spacecraft carrying scientific instruments. Their flights last only a few minutes but can be launched precisely at fleeting targets.
Beginning the night of June 13, Barjatya and his team will monitor ALTAIR (ARPA Long-Range Tracking and Instrumentation Radar), a high-powered, ground-based radar system at the launch site, for signs of developing Sporadic-E layers. When conditions are right, Barjatya will give the launch command. A few minutes later, the rocket will be in flight.
The SEED science team and mission management team in front of the ARPA Long-Range Tracking and Instrumentation Radar (ALTAIR). The SEED team will use ALTAIR to monitor the ionosphere for signs of Sporadic-E layers and time the launch. U.S. Army Space and Missile Defense Command On ascent, the rocket will release colorful vapor tracers. Ground-based cameras will track the tracers to measure wind patterns in three dimensions. Once inside the Sporadic-E layer, the rocket will deploy four subpayloads — miniature detectors that will measure particle density and magnetic field strength at multiple points. The data will be transmitted back to the ground as the rocket descends.
On another night during the launch window, the team will launch a second, nearly identical rocket to collect additional data under potentially different conditions.
Barjatya and his team will use the data to improve computer models of the ionosphere, aiming to explain how Sporadic-E layers form so close to the equator.
“Sporadic-E layers are part of a much larger, more complicated physical system that is home to space-based assets we rely on every day,” Barjatya said. “This launch gets us closer to understanding another key piece of Earth’s interface to space.”
By Miles Hatfield
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
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Last Updated Jun 12, 2025 Related Terms
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By NASA
ESA/Hubble & NASA, C. Murray This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image features a sparkling cloudscape from one of the Milky Way’s galactic neighbors, a dwarf galaxy called the Large Magellanic Cloud. Located 160,000 light-years away in the constellations Dorado and Mensa, the Large Magellanic Cloud is the largest of the Milky Way’s many small satellite galaxies.
This view of dusty gas clouds in the Large Magellanic Cloud is possible thanks to Hubble’s cameras, such as the Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) that collected the observations for this image. WFC3 holds a variety of filters, and each lets through specific wavelengths, or colors, of light. This image combines observations made with five different filters, including some that capture ultraviolet and infrared light that the human eye cannot see.
The wispy gas clouds in this image resemble brightly colored cotton candy. When viewing such a vividly colored cosmic scene, it is natural to wonder whether the colors are ‘real’. After all, Hubble, with its 7.8-foot-wide (2.4 m) mirror and advanced scientific instruments, doesn’t bear resemblance to a typical camera! When image-processing specialists combine raw filtered data into a multi-colored image like this one, they assign a color to each filter. Visible-light observations typically correspond to the color that the filter allows through. Shorter wavelengths of light such as ultraviolet are usually assigned blue or purple, while longer wavelengths like infrared are typically red.
This color scheme closely represents reality while adding new information from the portions of the electromagnetic spectrum that humans cannot see. However, there are endless possible color combinations that can be employed to achieve an especially aesthetically pleasing or scientifically insightful image.
Learn how Hubble images are taken and processed.
Text credit: ESA/Hubble
Image credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, C. Murray
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By NASA
6 min read
NASA’s Dragonfly Mission Sets Sights on Titan’s Mysteries
When it descends through the thick golden haze on Saturn’s moon Titan, NASA’s Dragonfly rotorcraft will find eerily familiar terrain. Dunes wrap around Titan’s equator. Clouds drift across its skies. Rain drizzles. Rivers flow, forming canyons, lakes and seas.
Artist’s concept of NASA’s Dragonfly on the surface of Saturn’s moon Titan. The car-sized rotorcraft will be equipped to characterize the habitability of Titan’s environment, investigate the progression of prebiotic chemistry in an environment where carbon-rich material and liquid water may have mixed for an extended period, and even search for chemical indications of whether water-based or hydrocarbon-based life once existed on Titan. NASA/Johns Hopkins APL/Steve Gribben But not everything is as familiar as it seems. At minus 292 degrees Fahrenheit, the dune sands aren’t silicate grains but organic material. The rivers, lakes and seas hold liquid methane and ethane, not water. Titan is a frigid world laden with organic molecules.
Yet Dragonfly, a car-sized rotorcraft set to launch no earlier than 2028, will explore this frigid world to potentially answer one of science’s biggest questions: How did life begin?
Seeking answers about life in a place where it likely can’t survive seems odd. But that’s precisely the point.
“Dragonfly isn’t a mission to detect life — it’s a mission to investigate the chemistry that came before biology here on Earth,” said Zibi Turtle, principal investigator for Dragonfly and a planetary scientist at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland. “On Titan, we can explore the chemical processes that may have led to life on Earth without life complicating the picture.”
On Earth, life has reshaped nearly everything, burying its chemical forebears beneath eons of evolution. Even today’s microbes rely on a slew of reactions to keep squirming.
“You need to have gone from simple to complex chemistry before jumping to biology, but we don’t know all the steps,” Turtle said. “Titan allows us to uncover some of them.”
Titan is an untouched chemical laboratory where all the ingredients for known life — organics, liquid water and an energy source — have interacted in the past. What Dragonfly uncovers will illuminate a past since erased on Earth and refine our understanding of habitability and whether the chemistry that sparked life here is a universal rule — or a wonderous cosmic fluke.
Before NASA’s Cassini-Huygens mission, researchers didn’t know just how rich Titan is in organic molecules. The mission’s data, combined with laboratory experiments, revealed a molecular smorgasbord — ethane, propane, acetylene, acetone, vinyl cyanide, benzene, cyanogen, and more.
These molecules fall to the surface, forming thick deposits on Titan’s ice bedrock. Scientists believe life-related chemistry could start there — if given some liquid water, such as from an asteroid impact.
Enter Selk crater, a 50-mile-wide impact site. It’s a key Dragonfly destination, not only because it’s covered in organics, but because it may have had liquid water for an extended time.
Selk crater, a 50-mile-wide impact site highlighted on this infrared image of Titan, is a key Dragonfly destination. Landing near Selk, Dragonfly will explore various sites, analyzing the surface chemistry to investigate the frozen remains of what could have been prebiotic chemistry in action. NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Nantes/University of Arizona The impact that formed Selk melted the icy bedrock, creating a temporary pool that could have remained liquid for hundreds to thousands of years under an insulating ice layer, like winter ponds on Earth. If a natural antifreeze like ammonia were mixed in, the pool could have remained unfrozen even longer, blending water with organics and the impactor’s silicon, phosphorus, sulfur and iron to form a primordial soup.
“It’s essentially a long-running chemical experiment,” said Sarah Hörst, an atmospheric chemist at Johns Hopkins University and co-investigator on Dragonfly’s science team. “That’s why Titan is exciting. It’s a natural version of our origin-of-life experiments — except it’s been running much longer and on a planetary scale.”
For decades, scientists have simulated Earth’s early conditions, mixing water with simple organics to create a “prebiotic soup” and jumpstarting reactions with an electrical shock. The problem is time. Most tests last weeks, maybe months or years.
The melt pools at Selk crater, however, possibly lasted tens of thousands of years. Still shorter than the hundreds of millions of years it took life to emerge on Earth, but potentially enough time for critical chemistry to occur.
“We don’t know if Earth life took so long because conditions had to stabilize or because the chemistry itself needed time,” Hörst said. “But models show that if you toss Titan’s organics into water, tens of thousands of years is plenty of time for chemistry to happen.”
Dragonfly will test that theory. Landing near Selk, it will fly from site to site, analyzing the surface chemistry to investigate the frozen remains of what could have been prebiotic chemistry in action.
Morgan Cable, a research scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California and co-investigator on Dragonfly, is particularly excited about the Dragonfly Mass Spectrometer (DraMS) instrument. Developed by NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, with a key subsystem provided by the CNES (Centre National d’Etudes Spatiales), DraMS will search for indicators of complex chemistry.
“We’re not looking for exact molecules, but patterns that suggest complexity,” Cable said. On Earth, for example, amino acids — fundamental to proteins — appear in specific patterns. A world without life would mainly manufacture the simplest amino acids and form fewer complex ones.
Generally, Titan isn’t regarded as habitable; it’s too cold for the chemistry of life as we know it to occur, and there’s is no liquid water on the surface, where the organics and likely energy sources exist.
Still, scientists have assumed that if a place has life’s ingredients and enough time, complex chemistry — and eventually life — should emerge. If Titan proves otherwise, it may mean we’ve misunderstood something about life’s start and it may be rarer than we thought.
“We won’t know how easy or difficult it is for these chemical steps to occur if we don’t go, so we need to go and look,” Cable said. “That’s the fun thing about going to a world like Titan. We’re like detectives with our magnifying glasses, looking at everything and wondering what this is.”
Dragonfly is being designed and built under the direction of the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL), which manages the mission for NASA. The team includes key partners at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Dragonfly is managed by NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, for the agency’s Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington.
For more information on Dragonfly, visit:
https://science.nasa.gov/mission/dragonfly/
By Jeremy Rehm
Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, Laurel, Md.
Media Contacts:
Karen Fox / Molly Wasser
Headquarters, Washington
202-358-1600
karen.c.fox@nasa.gov / molly.l.wasser@nasa.gov
Mike Buckley
Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory
443-567-3145
michael.buckley@jhuapl.edu
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By NASA
Explore Hubble Hubble Home Overview About Hubble The History of Hubble Hubble Timeline Why Have a Telescope in Space? Hubble by the Numbers At the Museum FAQs Impact & Benefits Hubble’s Impact & Benefits Science Impacts Cultural Impact Technology Benefits Impact on Human Spaceflight Astro Community Impacts Science Hubble Science Science Themes Science Highlights Science Behind Discoveries Hubble’s Partners in Science Universe Uncovered Explore the Night Sky Observatory Hubble Observatory Hubble Design Mission Operations Missions to Hubble Hubble vs Webb Team Hubble Team Career Aspirations Hubble Astronauts Multimedia Multimedia Images Videos Sonifications Podcasts e-Books Online Activities 3D Hubble Models Lithographs Fact Sheets Posters Hubble on the NASA App Glossary News Hubble News Social Media Media Resources More 35th Anniversary Online Activities 2 min read
Hubble Captures Cotton Candy Clouds
This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image features a cloudscape in the Large Magellanic Cloud., a dwarf satellite galaxy of the Milky Way. ESA/Hubble & NASA, C. Murray This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image features a sparkling cloudscape from one of the Milky Way’s galactic neighbors, a dwarf galaxy called the Large Magellanic Cloud. Located 160,000 light-years away in the constellations Dorado and Mensa, the Large Magellanic Cloud is the largest of the Milky Way’s many small satellite galaxies.
This view of dusty gas clouds in the Large Magellanic Cloud is possible thanks to Hubble’s cameras, such as the Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) that collected the observations for this image. WFC3 holds a variety of filters, and each lets through specific wavelengths, or colors, of light. This image combines observations made with five different filters, including some that capture ultraviolet and infrared light that the human eye cannot see.
The wispy gas clouds in this image resemble brightly colored cotton candy. When viewing such a vividly colored cosmic scene, it is natural to wonder whether the colors are ‘real’. After all, Hubble, with its 7.8-foot-wide (2.4 m) mirror and advanced scientific instruments, doesn’t bear resemblance to a typical camera! When image-processing specialists combine raw filtered data into a multi-colored image like this one, they assign a color to each filter. Visible-light observations typically correspond to the color that the filter allows through. Shorter wavelengths of light such as ultraviolet are usually assigned blue or purple, while longer wavelengths like infrared are typically red.
This color scheme closely represents reality while adding new information from the portions of the electromagnetic spectrum that humans cannot see. However, there are endless possible color combinations that can be employed to achieve an especially aesthetically pleasing or scientifically insightful image.
Watch “How Hubble Images are Made” on YouTube
Facebook logo @NASAHubble @NASAHubble Instagram logo @NASAHubble Media Contact:
Claire Andreoli (claire.andreoli@nasa.gov)
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD
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Last Updated May 15, 2025 Editor Andrea Gianopoulos Location NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Related Terms
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By NASA
2 min read
Space Cloud Watch Needs Your Photos of Night-Shining Clouds
Noctilucent Clouds observed from Bozeman, MT on 16 July 2009 at 4:29 MDT. The Space Cloud Watch project needs more photos like this one to diagnose changes in our atmosphere! Photo credit: Dr. Joseph A Shaw Noctilucent or night-shining clouds are rare, high-altitude clouds that glow with a blue silvery hue at dusk or dawn when the sun shines on them from below the horizon. These ice clouds typically occur near the north and south poles but are increasingly being reported at mid- and low latitudes. Observing them helps scientists better understand how human activities may affect our atmosphere.
Now, the Space Cloud Watch project is asking you to report your own observations of noctilucent clouds and upload your own photographs. Combined with satellite data and model simulations, your data can help us figure out why these noctilucent clouds are suddenly appearing at mid-low latitudes, where temperatures are usually too warm for them to form.
“I find these clouds fascinating and can’t wait to see the amazing pictures,” said project lead Dr. Chihoko Cullens from the University of Colorado, Boulder Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics.
Did you see or photograph any night-shining clouds? Upload them here. Later, the science team will transfer them to a site on the Zooniverse platform where you or other volunteers can help examine them and identify wave structures in the cloud images.
If you love clouds, NASA has more citizen science projects for you. Try Cloudspotting on Mars, Cloudspotting on Mars: Shapes, or GLOBE Observer Clouds!
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Last Updated May 15, 2025 Related Terms
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