Two research rockets took off just north of Fairbanks at the Poker Flat Research Range last week to study space dust and dying stars.
The first rocket to go up was part of the INFUSE-2 mission, staffed by a team of researchers from the University of Colorado Boulder. The project aims to study how dying stars distribute the material that helps fuel the next generation of stars and planets.
Brian Fleming is the principal investigator for INFUSE-2. He said the project’s rocket carried the first spectrograph that can process far-ultraviolet light, which allowed them to study a much larger area of a nebula in just a few minutes. A spectrograph is an instrument that takes in light waves and stretches them out so researchers can see each layer.
“Our science was to observe Messier 27 — or the Dumbbell Nebula — to look at what happens when stars die,” he said. “Everything in our galaxy is brought to us by stars. When massive stars die, they blow up in a huge explosion, and they push gas around the galaxy.”
Cosmic dust bunnies
Earlier in the week, NASA’s DUST-III rocket launched through heavy snow clouds for a separate experiment. Joe Nuth heads up the project, which aims to study something much, much smaller: space dust.
“Basically, when stars run out of hydrogen, they start to lose their outer shells — things like silicon, magnesium, iron, those sorts of things,” Nuth said. “They go from the vapor to the solid. We're looking at the condensation of very tiny grains and how they grow from the vapor.”
To do that, Nuth says his team had to launch a tiny laboratory into the atmosphere. Inside, it heated a filament of silicate dust to around 2,000 degrees Celsius, turning it into gas. It has to be inside a rocket to experience microgravity, allowing scientists to study how cosmic dust particles form and grow without being disturbed.
“If the growth process is efficient, what you make are the equivalent of big rocks,” Nuth said. “They're only a tenth of a micron in size, but in astrophysical terms, they're the equivalent of big rocks. If, on the other hand, the growth is very inefficient, they don't grow very much. What you end up with is the equivalent of dust bunnies.”
Nuth said the study could further scientific understanding of the dust produced by volcanic eruptions and coal-fired power plants — of which Alaska has both.
Nuth and Fleming said both experiments at the Poker Flat Research Range were successful, and that they were able to recover most of the expensive rocket parts after the launches.