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There’s one thing that stands between us

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and the harsh environment of space — our atmosphere.

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The part of Earth that sustains all life.

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But here, in the closest town to the North Pole, it’s slowly leaking away.

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A team headed there to launch rockets into the leak.

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But it’s not the lack of atmosphere that they’re concerned about.

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The leak is a natural process that will take billions of years.

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So we’re not going to run out any time soon.

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It’s part of the larger story of how a planet’s atmosphere changes over time —

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a key factor in the search for life on other planets.

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We have 35 residents and 60 of our team together

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in a town that is completely isolated — there’s a plane twice a week

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and there’s a thousand polar bears nearby

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This is Doug Rowland,

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a NASA scientist, who’s taken his team to Ny-Alesund on the island of Svalbard.

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The island lies beneath one of two regions near Earth’s poles called the cusps.

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It’s where we can access space directly.

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And where a hundred tons of atmosphere escapes into space each day.

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This escape gives clues to how long an atmosphere will last

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and ultimately whether it says around long enough to sustain life.

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We’re trying to understand is how did Earth’s atmosphere evolve over time

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and how do other planets that might be like Earth or more dissimilar to Earth, how did their atmospheres evolve.

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So Doug joined forces with Joran Moen –  a professor at the University of Oslo –

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who started the “Grand Challenge Initiative – Cusp”.

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It’s an international mission to launch 12 rockets into the Earth’s northern cusp.

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And Doug — he’s the mission leader for the first two rockets of the campaign.

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We don’t want to waste our rocket.

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It takes us 3 years to make the rocket and only 15 minutes to use it

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and I don’t want to waste my shot here.

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He’s using a sounding rocket, which is different from the bigger rockets that carry satellites and humans into space.

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It’s a small, suborbital rocket that flies briefly into space,

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collects real-time data for around 15 minutes, then falls back to Earth.

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It’s affordable, quick to build, and can launch towards a precise point.

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The major advantage is that you can launch into a target on the sky.

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But there’s a limited launch window and only one chance to get the launch right.

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We have these unguided rockets. They go where you point them

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unless the wind is blowing because the wind literally just blows them over.

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We don’t launch when there’s high winds.

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So to measure the winds, they launch balloons with GPS trackers.

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They’re released every 15 to 30 minutes.

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And then, they’re monitored to see how fast the winds are carrying them.

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The ground winds were about 12, 13 meters per second.

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Gusting — 17. It’s just way off.

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You’re filled with trepidation. Oh my gosh, is this thing that I built,

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is it going to work after all this.

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So, I think we’re going to scrub for today.

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I’d like to thank everyone. I think it was a great performance. Thanks a lot.

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This that means we are scrubbing this operation for today

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and try again tomorrow.

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The mission is named Visualizing Ion Outflow via Neutral Atom Sensing-2, or VISIONS-2.

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In short, they’re looking at how oxygen is getting enough energy to escape.

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It’s a good test of how atmospheric escape works.

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Earth’s gravity should hold onto the oxygen, and yet we see this gas shooting off into space.

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We’re trying to figure out how that works. 

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That is a science question that has been hanging around for four decades.

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Fortunately, anyone can see atmospheric escape at the right place and time.

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In Svalbard, we have the so-called polar night. It’s dark all 24 hours

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This continual darkness is key for witnessing this.

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This is the cusp aurora. It’s a type of northern lights that appears between 8:00 a.m. and noon,

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and you can only see it when it’s dark during the day.

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It looks similar to the aurora that occurs at night.

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But when these iridescent colors dance at this hour each day,

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a hundred tons of oxygen escapes from Earth’s atmosphere into space.

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This is our sport now, to chase the aurora

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Working with them is the EISCAT radar and Kjell Henriksen Observatory.

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They have additional instruments to find the aurora.


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Sometimes it’s cloudy so we use radars to track the the cusp.

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We can give advice that this is the right type of aurora.

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This is the wall of science — a collection of data from satellites and ground instruments

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that helps them predict where the cusp aurora will be. 

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So, the cusp actually isn’t in a fixed point in space—it kind of moves around

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What’s controlling the cusp’s movement is the Sun interacting with Earth. 

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Our planet is surrounded by a magnetic field that helps us hold on to our atmosphere.

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But at the north and south poles the magnetic field bends inwards, creating a corridor between Earth and space.

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When energy is released from the Sun, via. a solar flare or a coronal mass ejection,

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all of that energy in the form of radiation rides down the magnetic field lines of the Earth

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and is transferred and dumped into the Earth’s atmosphere.

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Electrons cascade into Earth’s atmosphere.

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They accelerate and collide with oxygen particles

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giving them energy to release light and sometimes, enough energy to escape.

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Collectively, this forms the cusp aurora and streams of escaping oxygen.

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This cusp is in constant motion.

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And we’ve got a fixed trajectory—we really can’t aim where the cusp is,

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we have to wait for the cusp to come across our line of sight.

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Can you guys hear Kjellmar?

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We’d like you, as soon as you see an indication that the cusp is moving close, to move it -- the radar dish if we can.

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This is EISCAT. It’s been very quiet. Very difficult to launch.

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Do you think we’ll launch today?

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No.

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Probably a 60% chance of launching.

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When we kind of started seeing this really good data, this clock started counting down,

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and that’s when everyone realized this is going to happen. We’re going to launch

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We’re doing everything we can to get that launch off before the aurora goes away,

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and it’s really, really challenging and nerve-wracking at that point.

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You can see the tension just rise in everybody when that happens.

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And so everyone's watching their instruments, getting really excited.

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And then at T minus one minute all of us ran out to go see the launch happen.

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And we immediately turn around and ran right back in to look at all the data that was coming back from the instruments.

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ou know how much time and effort went into it because we all worked on it

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and there’s just nothing that compares to that feeling.

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Everybody, in every one of those little places, you know, really just so happy to contribute to getting the science.

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It's really an incredible experience.

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This is a story about what it takes to launch science instruments into space.

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But the real adventure will be in the data they sent back.

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Hidden within the numbers will be answers that reach far beyond Earth,

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shedding light on how atmospheres throughout the universe change, evolve, and perhaps, support life.

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