The sounding rocket released bright puffs of tri-methyl aluminum, which scientists track from the ground to study winds near the lower boundary of space. The streak on the bottom right is formed by chemicals that have been moved and distorted by winds and turbulence.

Photo Courtesy Carl Andersen

On a clear, cold night two winters ago in Fort Yukon, Carl Andersen watched a rocket he helped design pierce the upper atmosphere. He and three other scientists shot pictures as the rocket ejected bright puffs of chemicals in an inverted V formation more than 60 miles up.

“They were the brightest things in the sky,” Andersen said from his office at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

A photo from the Leonid Kulik expedition to the Tunguska region of Russia in 1929. A meteorite or comet knocked down millions of trees in one of the largest space-object-meets-Earth events in recorded history.

The Leonid Kulik Expedition, St. Petersburg Museum.

Near a small village in Russia, Marina Ivanova stepped into cross-country skis and kicked toward a hole in the snow. The meteorite specialist with the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History and Vernadsky Institute in Moscow was hunting for fragments of the great Chelyabinsk Meteorite that exploded three days earlier.

A rocket part recovery in summer 2012 from the Marsh Fork of the Canning River in northern Alaska.

Courtesy Poker Flat Research Range.

Following up on a NASA promise to recover spent rocket parts scattered for decades across northern Alaska, workers for Poker Flat Research Range recovered more than 7,000 pounds of debris from 17 different sites in 2012.