NASA Will Light Up Skies Over East Coast Tonight (Watch It)

The U.S. East Coast may be in for quite the light show tonight. NASA will launch a rocket this evening on a mission that promises to put on a spectacular show for stargazers.

See live video here and here.

The bright phenomenon promised by NASA will be caused by an experiment aboard the organization's sounding rocket. It will release a chemical tracer that should create two bright, red-colored lithium vapor trails in space that could be seen by waters across the mid-Atlantic region and possibly even further away.

The scheduled launch window for the rocket is between 5:30 p.m. to 6:30 p.m. EST. Once the rocket is out over the Atlantic and high in the sky, it will ignite the thermite that it's carrying, which will vaporize the lithium and create its reddish trails. Since the rocket will be so high up (one trail will ignite 72 miles up while the other will ignite 78 miles up), the trails will be illuminated by sunlight, even though the sun will have appeared to have fully set at ground level.

What exactly is this experiment? NASA scientists hope that the shape of these contrails over time will give them valuable information about wind speed and direction in our turbulent upper atmosphere. They'll also be testing the lithium vapor itself, trying to determine which configuration of lithium is best for testing science phenomena in space.

If you want to see the show, there are a few things to keep in mind. Make sure to have a clear, unobstructed view of the horizon in the direction of Wallops Island, which is where the launch will occur. If weather conditions are unfavorable, the firings will happen another night.

NASA will launch two more missions this year that will also use the lithium trails. They will allow scientists to observe events in space. One will occur in April, while the second will occur in June.