5 Rockets from MARS Will Pack a Wallop

By Ryan Murphy
Capital News Service

RICHMOND, Va. – A bit of Cape Canaveral is coming to Virginia, as NASA gets ready to launch five rockets over five minutes from the Wallops Flight Facility at the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport on Virginia’s Eastern Shore.

“The last time that we did a salvo of this large a number of rockets from Wallops Flight Facility was back in the early-mid ’70 s with the eclipse,” said Jack Vieira, the facility’s project manager for NASA’s Anomalous Transport Rocket Experiment, or ATREX.

“We’ve done multiple rocket launches like this up in Poker Flat, Alaska, but we haven’t done this particular type of salvo from Wallops for quite some time.”

The spaceport, started in 1995, will host the launch of a series of sub-orbital rockets intended to release chemical tracer trails into the upper atmosphere. The tracers will allow scientists to study jet stream winds in the ionosphere, 60 miles above Earth’s surface.

“The region where (high-altitude jet streams) occurs is arguably the most interesting part of the atmosphere,” said Miguel Larsen of Clemson University, ATREX’s principal investigator. “It’s the region where you start getting charged particles. There’s a significant electrical component to the atmosphere.”

The charged particles can cause “electronic turbulence,” which can affect satellite and radio communications. That’s one reason NASA wants to take a closer look at the behavior of the winds.

“In order to understand the turbulence … we need to deploy the trails at the same time,” Vieira said of the rapid launch timeline. Using different launch angles and payloads, all of the rockets will reach the appropriate altitude more or less simultaneously to deploy their chemical tracers right at the edge of space.

The launch window is set for sometime between March 14 and April 3, with weather and visibility being the biggest factors at play in determining the date. NASA projects that the rocket burn of the launches and the chemical trails, which will glow a milky-white, will be visible across most of the mid-Atlantic.

Graphics on NASA’s website indicate that the event may be viewable from as far away as South Carolina, West Virginia and southern New Hampshire.

Meanwhile, in the Virginia General Assembly, negotiations continue over legislation to dramatically improve funding for the Virginia Commercial Spaceflight Authority, which oversees the spaceport.

During the last budget cycle in 2010, the authority’s funding was cut to about $800,000 annually. House Bill 813 and Senate Bill 284 would boost funding to $15 million a year. The bills are part of the state budget negotiations.

The legislation also would trim the authority’s board of directors to nine seats from 13. The Virginia secretary of commerce and trade and the state secretary of technology would both lose their seats on the board.