https://peertube.dngr.us/videos/watch/2c2f9b00-6a54-4c20-9853-f008c516db78 This video shows two South American observations of the IRM satellite's release, on 18 July 1985, of barium thermite into the earth's magnetosphere. This was one of several experiments in the AMPTE (Active Magnetospheric Particle Tracer Explorer) program. AMPTE was a trilateral project (USA, UK, and Germany) with the aim of studying the solar wind and initiating the first artificial comet. It consisted of three sub-satellites: CCE, IRM and UKS. From the abstract of the referenced journal publication: "barium clouds were injected into the solar wind from the AMPTE satellite. The clouds resembled those of natural comets in that a head and tail were clearly visible. Tail rays formed with speeds of a few tens of kilometres per second, and other structures separated at even higher speeds. The comet head, instead of moving slowly downstream, performed a lateral excursion of several hundred kilometres." The video consists of two segments: (a.) Observations made by G. Haerendel at Arequipa, Peru: Formation of comet head, penetration of magnetic field, ion extraction, recoil. (b.) Observations made by A. Valenzuela from Argentine Boeing 707: Growth of comet tail, separation of flux tube. Image processing on both by H. Hoefner. The final video was produced in 1989 by the Max-Planck-Institut für extraterrestrische Physik. Unidentified classical music is the only sound on the video. This NTSC VHS dub is from the personal collection of solar physicist Ted Speiser (1934–2016). It was digitized to Lagarith AVI and transcoded to H.264 MP4 in 2020. Date: 1989 Mirrored from Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/AMPTE.barium.S.America Wed, 15 Jul 2026 08:34:29 GMT https://validator.w3.org/feed/docs/rss2.html PeerTube - https://peertube.dngr.us https://peertube.dngr.us/lazy-static/avatars/ec5edb1e-3795-4978-be4f-c67e98fbc992.png https://peertube.dngr.us/videos/watch/2c2f9b00-6a54-4c20-9853-f008c516db78 All rights reserved, unless otherwise specified in the terms specified at https://peertube.dngr.us/about and potential licenses granted by each content's rightholder.