We have been asked several times what are the vertical stripes in videos of atmospheric atomic bomb tests.
I wondered about this for a long time when I first came to the museum. The streamers you see in film of atmospheric nuclear weapons tests were smoke trails made by sounding rockets fired just before the detonation. They were used to make a sort of graph paper in the air for recording the propagation of shock waves and wind currents from the explosion.
A current project under way at Los Alamos uses something like confetti, numerous high definition video cameras, and super computers to try to build a three dimensional model of the turbulence downstream from a wind turbine tower. They are using the multiple points-of-view and the computers to track each individual speck of paper. I think the paper is dispersed upwind of the tower using a sounding rocket and a conventional firework explosive. Some technologies are just too much fun to leave on the shelf.
