While Virginia will not be in the direct path of the upcoming Total Solar Eclipse, it will be playing a role related to the eclipse that day.
NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility on the Virginia coast will be launch three rockets to study disturbances in the Earth’s ionosphere during the eclipse. The rockets will be launched 45 minutes before, during, and 45 minutes after the peak local eclipse.
These launches are part of NASA’s Atmospheric Perturbations around Eclipse Path (APEP) mission. Such launches during an eclipse are not unusual as NASA hopes to learn a few things from this study.
Aroh Barjatya, a professor of engineering physics at Florida’s Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University campus, stated:
Understanding the ionosphere and developing models to help us predict disturbances is crucial to making sure our increasingly communication-dependent world operates smoothly.
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