© Andøya Space Center/Trond Abrahamsen
North of Norway over the Norwegian and Greenland Seas, a magnetic bubble known as the cusp surrounds Earth and dips inward. Some air in the cusp is unusually dense, and the CREX-2 mission aims to understand why.
Around local noon, when the Sun is at its highest point, a funnel-shaped gap in our planet's magnetic field passes overhead. Earth's magnetic field shields us from the solar wind, the stream of charged particles spewing off the Sun. The gap in that field, called the polar cusp, allows the solar wind a direct line of access to Earth's atmosphere.
Radio and GPS signals behave strangely when they travel through this part of the sky. In the last 20 years, scientists and spacecraft operators noticed something else unusual as spacecraft pass through this region:
They slow down.
"At around 250 miles above Earth, spacecraft feel more drag, sort of like they've hit a speed bump," said Mark Conde, a physicist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks and the principal investigator for NASA's Cusp Region Experiment-2, or CREX-2, sounding rocket mission.
That's because the air in the cusp is noticeably denser than air elsewhere in the spacecrafts' orbits around Earth. But no one knows why, or how. By understanding the forces at play in the cusp, scientists hope to better anticipate changes in spacecraft trajectories.
The CREX-2 payload was successfully launched at 3:25 a.m. EST on December 1, 2021, from the Andøya Space Center in Norway. The four-stage Oriole IV sounding rocket carried the payload to an apogee of 392 miles. Preliminary reports are that the flight was successful and the ampules carrying the vapors performed as planned. Good data was received including data from the vapor imaging team.
Comment: Kreigman's last remarks could almost be taken as an unconscious endorsement of intelligent design.