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In October, an astronaut from the International Space Station took a picture of what looks like another world, yellow and orange. But this photo, taken at about thirty kilometers above Australia, is only the Earth with a strange tint due to an atmospheric phenomenon called airglow.
You may remember from your high school science class that the Earth's atmosphere is a layer of gas that surrounds it protects us from the harmful ultraviolet rays of the sun. When UV rays reach the Earth's lower atmosphere, they activate the molecules in the air and this energy is released as light.
Although there is usually a certain degree of radiation in our atmosphere, it is not always visible and the bands of colors that we see vary according to the atoms present in the different layers of the atmosphere. In the ISS photo, the light ray appears in yellow and orange, but the light ray seen from the Earth usually appears in red and green.
NASA is studying AirWlow to better understand how our atmosphere works. Since the atmosphere is a buffer between Earth and space, his study can help scientists better understand the connection between the weather on Earth and in space. To this end, NASA plans to launch a new satellite called Ionspheric Connection Explorer (ICON); the launch was originally scheduled for today (November 7), but was postponed due to a glitch in the rocket. Once launched, it will monitor the Earth's atmosphere from its orbit about 360 miles above the Earth.
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