NASA experiment to color the skies to learn about Earth’s atmosphere

Acting NASA Director Robert Lightfoot on Monday discussed how NASA is going to launch a rocket to change the color of the skies to learn more about Earth’s upper atmosphere and whether the Trump administration’s budget cuts will hurt the space organization.

“We’re putting sounding rockets up that have smoke in them that give us a way to look at the upper atmosphere in a different way… understanding the upper atmosphere, pretty exciting stuff and it will be a pretty exciting launch, no worries for anybody, just kind of a normal day’s work for us with the sounding rockets,” he told FOX Business’ Liz Claman.

Lightfoot explained why NASA is happy with Trump’s 2018 budget which, if passed will cut the department’s funding by $500 million dollars.

“We’re pretty happy because it keeps the constancy of purpose for us in terms of what we are trying to do as an agency. We had to make some decisions in our science and some decisions in our education area but for the most part for human exploration and for our science missions, we got a strong set of missions that we are moving forward,” he said.