News Excerpt:

NASA's first-ever experimental endeavour, the Atmospheric Waves Experiment, aims to investigate the interaction between space and terrestrial weather.

About Space Weather:

• The Sun and its activities, such as solar flares and emissions and the types of matter that predominate in the space surroundings, continue to impact the environment around Earth and the other planets.
• When the weather over Earth turns extreme, Space weather, too, can suffer extreme events. 
• These directly influence crucial Earthly installations such as satellite-based communication systems, radio communication networks, and space-based aircraft orbits or stations. 
• They also impact the seamless functioning of power grids, navigation systems, and Global Positioning Systems (GPS).

About Atmospheric Waves:

• Atmospheric gravity waves (AGW) are one such vertical wave.
• The waves are often produced by abrupt disturbances or extreme weather events that cause stable air to be displaced vertically.
• Natural phenomena like thunderstorms, hurricanes, tornadoes, regional orography, and others can send out a variety of periodic waves, including Atmospheric Gravity Waves (AGWs), in the lower levels of the atmosphere.

Significance of the Atmospheric Waves Experiment (AWE):

• This is a first-of-its-kind NASA experiment to investigate how space and terrestrial weather interact.
• This million mission will investigate the relationships between waves in the lower and upper atmosphere, and consequently, space weather, as part of NASA's Heliophysics Explorers Programme.
• The impact of transitory events from hurricanes or tornadoes on the ionosphere is still not completely understood.

• It will be placed on the exterior of the Earth-orbiting International Space Station (ISS). 
• It will observe Earth from the vantage position and capture the bands of colourful light, also called airglow.
• It will measure the airglow at the mesopause, located between 85 and 87 km above the Earth's surface and where the atmosphere's temperature drops to minus 100 degrees Celsius. 
• The modest airglow in the infrared bandwidth, which appears the brightest and is easiest to identify, can be captured at this altitude.
• At higher altitudes, it can resolve waves at finer horizontal scales than are typically visible to satellites.

The objective of NASA’s AWE experiment:

• It will map the Earth's atmosphere's vivid airglows with precision.
• It is an Advanced Mesospheric Temperature Mapper (ATMT), an instrument that will scan or map the mesopause (a region between the mesosphere and thermosphere). 
• By utilising the four identical telescopes that make up an imaging radiometer, researchers intend to measure the wavelength-specific brightness of light.

• This information can be converted into a temperature map, which could reveal the airglow movement and give clues on their role in the upper atmosphere and Space weather.