A mission to explore energy transport in space using a NASA suborbital sounding rocket launching May 8, 2021, from NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia may provide a brief light show for residents of the eastern United States and Bermuda. https://www.nasa.gov/wallops/2021/p...ocket-launch-visible-in-eastern-united-states Good Light show as they create a plasma in space weather experiment.
Curious if this level of ionization will create an opportunity for propagation of 10-6-2 meter signals within and near the coverage area. Hopefully there is enough activity to check on that, especially with higher QRO, gain antennas, using Morse CW, not FT8, since the reflected signal is often very distorted. This skip-mode occurs often with a high K index and is quite popular in the northern & northeastern states and provinces near and under the aurora "umbrella" of the magnetic north pole. I have great recollections from living in MN of working new grids on 6 & 2m using the "hiss", even out to the east coast > 1200 miles, and which sometimes is strong enough for ghostly garbled SSB contact.
No Launch last night but going again tonight at between 8 and 8:43 est. Hopefully someone will get a crack at it. If not will be pretty. I don't have time to get a beam up so here's to those who try.
Trying again tonight no sooner than 2005. You'll be able to watch live here: https://video.ibm.com/channel/nasa-tv-wallops My experience with these exact sounding rockets in the past is that they're hard to see even from ~50 miles away (I used to live in Southern Maryland and would watch from Point Lookout). You might see the green if you're much younger than the typical ham op. Probably won't see the violet colorization at all (even says as much right on their write-up). I'd also be really surprised if a gallon of ionized gas would be enough to make any noticeable difference in propagation, but I'm a pessimist.
