A high-altitude aircraft flight on April 18, 1997 detected an enormous aerosol cloud at 20 km altitude near California (37 N). Not visually observed, the cloud had high concentrations of soot and sulfate aerosol, and was over 180 km in horizontal extent. The cloud was probably a large hydrocarbon fueled vehicle, most likely from rocket motors burning liquid oxygen and kerosene. One of two Russian Soyuz rockets could have produced the cloud: a launch from the Baikonur Cosmodrome, Kazakhstan on April 6; or from Plesetsk, Russia on April 9. Parcel trajectories and long-lived trace gas concentrations suggest the Baikonur launch as the cloud source. Cloud trajectories do not trace the Soyuz plume from Asia to North America, illustrating the uncertainties of point-to-point trajectories. This cloud encounter is the only stratospheric measurement of a hydrocarbon fuel powered rocket.
Chance Encounter with a Stratospheric Kerosene Rocket Plume From Russia Over California
2000
12 pages
Report
Keine Angabe
Englisch
Combustion, Engines, & Propellants , Air Pollution & Control , Exhaust emission , Jet exhaust , Rocket exhaust , Kerosene , Soot , Aerosols , Pollution transport , Soyuz spacecraft , Meteorological flight , Atmospheric composition , Ceilings(Meteorology) , Concentration(Composition) , Gas composition , Trace contaminants , Trace elements
LIDAR Stratospheric Solid Rocket Motor Exhaust Plume Measurements
British Library Conference Proceedings | 1997
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