It’s incredible looking at this frame-by-frame (by quickly clicking between pause and play) at the big explosion at 1:08 and seeing the shock waves go out.

Those blobs falling back to the solar “surface” are bigger than earth. I wonder how much of the plasma managed to attain solar escape velocity.

Gary 7

Second video… very cool. I just wish they’d included some sort of mission elapsed clock. I would have liked to know how long the whole video actually was.

@12 Paul, The word “lithobraking” makes me laugh.

Kaleidoscopic on the second one with the spinning.

Gave a good idea of the size of the payload at the end there too – we just needed a big ant or spider to wander right up to the camera at the end post-landing.

Spectacular on the first – love the side by side comparison in the various wavelengths there.

The only way I can finish is to throw up J.B.S. Haldane: “The universe is not only queerer than we suppose but queerer than we can suppose.” Aside from that, general AWESOME.

As well – while I didn’t listen to the music, I can already think of a better soundtrack to go with the first vid (and also an excuse to promote the upcoming album of one of my fav severely underrated artists!!): http://vimeo.com/26533184

Second video;
I’m now inclined to look up more on sounding rockets!
Are these the ones that explore what’s been dubbed the “ignore-o-sphere”?

They can’t fool me, labelling it lens flare! Pfft. That’s blatantly a Mark 7 Battle Saucer from Metebelis 3.

Seriously though, stunning stuff. I’m presuming the Virgin Galactic craft won’t spin so much though, otherwise I might think twice about giving it a go.

It looks to my unprofessional eye like the ejected gas follows a largely ballistic trajectory until just before crashing back to the “surface”, where it becomes increasingly more affected by the magnetic field lines which only then dominate over the ballistic path in terms of force.

The adiabatic (I assume) heating of the chromosphere/ photosphere as the relatively cool blobs of gas smash into it after falling from a great height is particularly interesting.

That’s correct. I’ll add that if it were reentering near vertically at orbital velocities the heat load would be even higher than a typical reentry from low earth orbit, since it would have to decelerate brutally to avoid lithobraking.

@ kuhnigget:

You got it, buddy!

And the solar eruption is just plain wow. It was gorgeous to begin with, but that video puts it all together in a stunning presentation.

One never goes broke when catering for the lowest common denominator!