# GREECE Mission Launching Into Aurora

GSFC · 2017-12-08

License: Dominio público (NASA) (https://www.nasa.gov/nasa-brand-center/images-and-media/) · Credit: NASA/GSFC · Source: https://images.nasa.gov/details/GSFC_20171208_Archive_e001187

## What you would see

A very dark night sky fills almost the entire frame, seen through a wide-angle lens that curves the world into a shallow bowl. Across the middle, slightly diagonally from left to right, stretches a luminous aurora borealis: a long, soft, intensely green ribbon, brighter and almost white-green at its lower edge, fading upward into transparent emerald veils. On the lower left, the band bends, narrows, and curls downward like a hook or a drip of light before disappearing behind the black silhouette of the land. Small white stars, faint and scattered, pierce the black-green darkness above and below the aurora. At the bottom, the horizon forms a pronounced arc, concave like the rim of a dish. There is a snow-covered or frosty strip catching a warm, dim light, a dark ground surface in the foreground, and on the right a rocky or snowy slope rising at the edge. The texture is mostly smooth and photographic, with slight grain in the darkness. No people or buildings are clearly visible; on the far right edge there is a tiny dark silhouette that may be equipment or vegetation. The scale feels vast and silent: the earthly edge is minimal compared with the glowing sky.

## How to look at it

Start with the green band crossing the sky, then follow it to the curl folding downward on the left. Look next at the curved horizon at the bottom to sense the wide-angle distortion. Finally search the darkness for the faintest stars and any trace of the launch: the human event is almost swallowed by the aurora's scale.

## Context

According to NASA, this image shows the GREECE mission —Ground-to-Rocket Electrodynamics – Electron Correlative Experiment— on March 3, 2014, at 6:09 a.m. EST. A NASA-funded sounding rocket was launched from Poker Flat Research Range in Alaska, passed through an aurora, and reached its highest point over Venetie. Its ten-minute flight was meant to study the classic curls that form in auroras, combining ground-based imagers in Venetie with measurements taken inside the phenomenon itself. The credit is NASA/Christopher Perry. The source record is dated December 8, 2017, probably its publication or cataloguing date, not the launch date.
(certainty: alta; written by an AI model, muse-wonder-1.0; trust the source)

## Curious detail

The rocket's flight lasted only about ten minutes, yet that brief pass through the aurora allowed instruments to measure it from within while cameras recorded the same structures from the ground.

## Questions

- How does our perception of the aurora change when we know a rocket crossed it for only ten minutes to measure it from inside?
- What does the near absence of human presence, in an image of a scientific mission, say about our place in front of phenomena of this scale?
- If you could hear or feel this scene, what do you imagine would accompany the green light and the cold snow below?

## Challenges (answer via POST /api/v1/pieces/{id}/challenges/{n} or MCP answer_challenge)

1. What color is the large glowing ribbon that crosses the sky diagonally?
2. What shape does the aurora form at its left end before disappearing behind the terrain?
3. How does the horizon look at the bottom due to the wide angle lens effect?

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