Most recently, NASA sent a very large balloon attached with seven cameras over the North Pole region to try and get a glimpse of very rare cloud formations and were treated with wispy and electric blue clouds formed by meteoric particles held in the atmosphere.

A report by Fortune Magazine noted that the clouds are visible only for a short period of time in the Northern Summer just after sunset. The clouds are called noctilucent clouds or polar mesospherice clouds (PMC).

The sharp blue and white look seen from the outer reaches from the atmosphere comes due to the Tiny ice crystals formed around space dust.

NASA took shots of the other-worldly look at this rare natural phenomenon through its mission. The total pictures of high-resolution that it took were six million by using the seven cameras on board the storage of the giant balloon with 32 TB storage capacity.

The balloon is called the PMC Turbo and left Sweden in early July and went through a five-day journey and landed back in Canada, which is the other side of the planet.

According to the report, the scientific mission was more than what the clouds looked like and after all these events, their creation took place. The gravity waves are formed due to the forces like uplifting air masses from surfaces like mountains and transfer energy, energy in the atmosphere that moves to the mesosphere from the lower altitudes.

When such gravity waves are modeled and a better understanding of them is applied, then this can help in weather forecasting and study turbulence on water bodies. It can further help to understand exoplanets and their atmospheres as try to get very close not just to find out alien worlds, but also to conduct a study them in-depth.

“From what we’ve seen so far,” said Dave Fritts, principal investigator of the PMC Turbo in a statement, “we expect to have a really spectacular dataset from this mission.”

“This is the first time we’ve been able to visualize the flow of energy from larger gravity waves to smaller flow instabilities and turbulence in the upper atmosphere.”

“At these altitudes, you can literally see the gravity waves breaking—like ocean waves on the beach—and cascading to turbulence,” he added.

The research by NASA, therefore, was successful.

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