Watch Live Today! Ariane 5 Rocket Launching NASA GOLD Experiment at 5:20 pm ET

[Judi Lynn]

By SPACE.com Staff | January 25, 2018 07:00am ET

NASA's new GOLD mission to investigate Earth's upper atmosphere, which launches today (Jan. 25) on an Ariane 5 rocket at 5:20 p.m. EST from Guiana Space Center in from French Guiana. Watch it live here, courtesy of NASA TV. NASA's live webcast begins at 5 p.m. EST.

From NASA:

On Jan. 25, 2018, NASA launches Global-scale Observations of the Limb and Disk, or GOLD, a hosted payload aboard SES-14, a commercial communications satellite. GOLD will investigate the dynamic intermingling of space and Earth’s uppermost atmosphere — and is the first NASA science mission to fly an instrument as a commercially hosted payload.

Space is not completely empty: It’s teeming with fast-moving charged particles and electric and magnetic fields that guide their motion. At the boundary between Earth’s atmosphere and space, the charged particles —called the ionosphere — co-exist with the upper reaches of the neutral atmosphere, called the thermosphere. The two commingle and influence one another constantly. This interplay — and the role terrestrial weather, space weather and Earth’s own magnetic field each have in it — is the focus of GOLD’s mission.

“The upper atmosphere is far more variable than previously imagined, but we don’t understand the interactions between all the factors involved,” said Richard Eastes, GOLD principal investigator at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado Boulder. “That’s where GOLD comes in: For the first time, the mission gives us the big picture of how different drivers meet and influence each other.”

More:
https://www.space.com/17933-nasa-television-webcasts-live-space-tv.html?utm_source=notification

[pangaia]

1. Always love to see these launches and other space stuff.!!

it said the thing burned 5 tons of fuel/second to get it off the ground !!!

I have a friend who is an aerospace engineer.. used to work on the space shuttle.... fascinating guy to listen to..