Thomas Moore, a NASA scientist, said that there have been enough observations to know that anywhere from a hundred to several hundred tonnes of the atmosphere are going into space every day.
Press Trust of India Dec 02,2018 12:00 PM IST
Washington: NASA is set to launch a sounding rocket to get a closer look at the how the Earth’s atmosphere is slowly leaking into space.
The NASA logo. File image: News18
Understanding atmospheric escape on Earth has applications all over the Universe, from predicting which far-off planets might be habitable to piecing together how Mars became the desolate, exposed landscape it is today, the US space agency said.
The VISIONS-2 mission, short for Visualizing Ion Outflow via Neutral Atom Sensing-2, is scheduled to launch no earlier than 4 December.
A sounding rocket makes brief, targeted flights into space before falling back to Earth just a few minutes later.
Sounding rockets are unique among scientific spacecraft for their superior dexterity. They can be carted to remote locations, where they are aimed and shot into short-lived events — like the sudden formation of the aurora borealis — at a moment’s notice.
