April 2, 20255 min readAurora Scientists Enlist Private Astronauts on Unusual Space MissionThe commercial astronauts onboard SpaceXs Fram2 mission are flying closer to Earths poles than anyone has before, offering an intriguing opportunity for auroral scienceBy Meghan Bartels edited by Lee BillingsSTEVE (strong thermal emission velocity enhancement) is seen in the night sky over a house in southern Alberta, Canada. Alan Dyer/Stocktrek Images/Alamy Stock PhotoFour passengers that launched onboard a SpaceX rocket on Monday are bound for a new orbital destinationlooping from pole to pole, perpendicular to Earths equatoron a mission dubbed Fram2 in a nod to a Norwegian polar ship.Prior to Fram2, crewed missions only reached orbits of up to 65 degrees inclination to the equator. This means no astronauts have ever flown in space over Antarctic terrain or much north of Iceland. But interesting things happen in the atmosphere at higher latitudesmost famously, auroras. Especially during periods of increased solar activity, these displays are typically visible at northern and southern latitudes of around 68 degrees during the night and 78 degrees during the day, painting a glowing oval around each pole. Other astronauts, particularly those on the International Space Station, have seen auroras from space, but Fram2 crew member Jannicke Mikkelsen is hoping to bring more science to the observations.While planning Fram2s activities, Mikkelsen teamed up with Katie Herlingshaw, a space physicist at Norways University Center in Svalbard, who works with an aurora-observing, crowdsourced science project to understand brilliant atmospheric phenomena. People are pretty much everywhere, and theyve all got phones, so theyre making, really, the densest observation network ever, Herlingshaw says.On supporting science journalismIf you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.Herlingshaw built on that community to develop a network of skywatchers to track the Fram2 flight and look for auroras along its path in both the Northern and Southern Hemispheres. She hopes that Mikkelsen will be able to use these observations to capture unique footage of the displays from the spacecrafts windows. Scientific American spoke with Herlingshaw about the project and its goals.[An edited transcript of the interview follows.]How will these observations be different from satellite data? Whats the value of having actual people up there?The satellite images that we do have are usually focused on photographing the whole auroral oval in one wavelength type, such as ultraviolet. But what were really interested in is small features, things that come and go quite quickly. We dont really have a good way to capture these features from polar-orbiting satellites.We now have a human up there who can change the camera settings, change the pointing direction and be aware of whats coming up on her orbit. [Mikkelsen] is taking these very high-resolution videos, and we have full-color images as well. Its quite a unique setup because these are the first people who have ever been there.What phenomena are you hoping to see? And how do they relate to auroras?A lot of people use the term aurora for anything thats caused by charged particles coming in from space along Earths magnetic field lines, impacting particles in the atmosphere and causing some kind of light emission. So the idea is that these particles should come from space. But there are some light emissions that are caused locallyinside our own atmosphereby very fast-moving plasma, for example. Its a bit of a debate about whether to call those aurora or just auroralike.So were calling them weird aurora as an umbrella term. These are all relatively newly published findings about features that we don't completely understand.For example, weve noticed these fragmented auroralike emissionsI just call them fragments. They dont look like the nearby regular aurora, which is kind of lined up vertically in the magnetic field line direction; the fragments, theyre coming off almost perpendicularly. That also points to the fact that these things are not coming in from spacesomething local is happening.Sometimes near these fragments, we have something called continuous emission. Were trial naming this as ghost aurora because its white. Auroras are usually not whitethey can appear that way because your eyes are surprisingly bad at picking up faint colors. So a lot of people see a gray kind of smudge in the sky or something, but if you look at it with scientific instruments that can pick out these colors, usually youll see, like, a green or a red or a blue. White is unusual for us because it means all the colors [of visible light] are present and combined together to make the white. Thats weird for the aurora, and it suggests some kind of heating effect going on in the atmosphere that's managing to excite all of these different colors, but we dont yet fully understand the mechanism behind it.Those are at high latitudes. For the people who are a bit farther south, they often see this other type of aurora called STEVE. STEVE also can be whitish in color, and we also sometimes see, nearby, these other things called streaks, which look and behave a lot like fragments. Were interested in: Why do these things look like this? Why do they act like this? And why do we see similar things at completely different places?What do you hope that youll accomplish during the mission?Well be really happy if we even get just one set of nice observations. All we really need is just one time where [Mikkelsen] sees some of these weird auroras paired with some observations from the ground. Best case, then were having more than one, as many as possible. But its kind of like trying to thread a needle with these things. You need the spacecraft going over somewhere that is dark, and then we have to check that its not cloudy there and that the aurora is active over there and that people are actually awake and photographing it from the ground.We would like to make some triangulations to pinpoint exactly what altitudes these are happening at. Were hoping to maybe look at their three-dimensional structure, and that can also perhaps help us figure out the associated mechanisms and light emissions. Weve also got radars in place to tell us information about how hot it is up there, how fast things are moving, what the density of the particles is. We would like to be able to say what these weird auroras are caused by, but it really depends on what kind of data we get.What do people need to know if they might want to take part?People need to have the correct time set on their camera. We cant use the observation if its the wrong time, and clocks recently switched around in some parts of the world. Its good to have the accuracy down to the second if possible. And then, when youre out there, also collect a location for your observation. We need those two things.For real-time notification to the astronaut, were asking people to post on various Facebook groups. The project websites photography instructions include a map of all of the different ones. People should join the nearest group to them or one of the more global groups in each hemisphere.But we cannot use these social media posts for science because as soon as you upload something to Facebook, the resolution and all of the information about the time and the exposure just disappear. So we also ask people to submit to a platform called Skywardenand in the observation story, put #SolarMaxMission. Observations that are submitted here can win some prizes that have been to space as well[Mikkelsen] is flying some Fram2 mission patches to give away.