NASA launched one of its largest sounding rockets Sunday from an East Coast facility in an experiment led by a University of Alaska Fairbanks Geophysical Institute space physics professor.

The four-stage Black Brant XII rocket carrying the KiNET-X experiment of principal investigator Peter Delamere lifted off from NASA's Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia at 8:44 p.m. Eastern time. The ascent of the rocket, which flew on an arc into the ionosphere before beginning its planned descent over the Atlantic Ocean near Bermuda, could be seen along the East Coast.

The experiment seeks to understand how a large mass of plasma such as the solar wind interacts at the particle level with, for example, the plasma of Earth's space environment.

On May 8, 2021, a piece of space junk from a Chinese rocket fell uncontrolled back to Earth and landed in the Indian Ocean near the Maldives. A year ago, in May 2020, another Chinese rocket met the same fate when it plummeted out of control into the waters off the West African coast. No one knew when or where either of these pieces of space junk were going to hit, so it was a relief when neither crashed on land or injured anyone.

Space debris is any nonfunctional human-made object in space.As a professor of space and society focused on space governance, I've noticed that there are three questions the public always asks when falling space debris gets into the news.

On November 1, 1961, a number of prominent scientists converged on the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Green Bank, West Virginia, for a three-day conference. A year earlier, this facility had been the site of the first modern SETI experiment (Project Ozma), where famed astronomers Frank Drake and Carl Sagan used the Green Bank telescope (aka "Big Ear") to monitor two nearby sun-like stars—Epsilon Eridani and Tau Ceti.

While unsuccessful, Ozma became a focal point for scientists who were interested in this burgeoning field known as the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). As a result, Drake and Sagan were motivated to hold the very first SETI conference, wherein the subject of looking for possible extraterrestrial radio signals would be discussed. In preparation for the meeting, Drake prepared the following heuristic equation:

N = R_* • f_p • n_e • f_l • f_i • f_c • L

This would come to be known as the "Drake equation," which is considered by many to be one of the most renowned equations in the history of science.