After several canceled attempts, the five sounding rockets in NASA's Anomalous Transport Rocket Experiment (ATREX) finally made their way up into the thermosphere just past the edge of space early Tuesday morning. Launched 80 seconds apart, they each released a cloud of trimethylaluminum into the Earth's upper atmosphere.
TMA is pyrophoric and quickly turns into an oxidized white smoke as it's released into the air. The man-made clouds quickly dispersed into the upper atmospheric jet stream, where they burned brightly enough to allow NASA to track the 200-to-300 mph air currents out over the Atlantic for up to twenty minutes. The upper jet stream, its transport mechanism and its patterns comprise an anomaly that has never been properly explained, unlike the lower jet stream which constantly appears on weather broadcasts.
The Earth's upper atmosphere is the domain of sounding rockets. NASA expects to do much more research in this area when private space firms begin flying tourists on suborbital trips, since the costs should drop dramatically. Still, experiments like ATREX, ones that require multiple flights in close succession, could not be done easily and would probably still require small flocks of sounding rockets.
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