Primer: The V-2 Rocket and Atmospheric Science January 14, 2009

For as long as there has been a concerted tradition of inquiry around the natural world, natural philosophers and scientists have dragged instruments up church towers and mountains and floated them aloft in balloons to ascertain how things are different at high altitudes.  This tradition grew rapidly in the early decades of the 20th century as ballooning technology improved, and as physicists, astronomers, chemists, and meteorologists decided that differences in the gaseous composition of the atmosphere, (more…)