NASA Podcasts  NASA EDGE: Understanding Auroras with VISIONS
› Download Vodcast (116MB)  Doug Rowland, Heliophysicist at NASA
Goddard Space Flight Center   CHRIS: So Doug, why do we use
sounding rockets to study the auroras?  DOUG: Sounding rockets
have many advantages. They’re sort of complimentary to
satellites. The satellites usually have a very extensive
instrumentation. They’re very expensive, very complex and they
have a lot of capability. What they do is fly, more or less,
horizontally through the region. One advantage of a sounding
rocket is it’s suborbital, which means it doesn’t orbit. It goes
up and it comes down. If you want to get a vertical profile of
what’s happening in a region, you might use a sounding rocket,
because you can say I want to launch from here and I’m going to
go up and I want to come back down. I want to measure as a
function of height what’s going on.  CHRIS: Right.  DOUG: The
satellite gives you a complimentary view, what’s happening as a
function of horizontal distance.  CHRI