Last Friday, strangely shaped clouds in shades of deep blue and aqua danced over Norway for around half an hour. The alien visuals, set against the more familiar green tinge of the aurora borealis, were not evidence of an extraterrestrial visitor, but rather a sign that a new NASA experiment is underway.

The NASA-funded Auroral Zone Upwelling Rocket Experiment––or AZURE––aims to help scientists better understand how the forces that create the northern lights change our planet’s atmosphere. Specifically, the aurora borealis’ technicolor light show is the result of powerful collisions in which highly energetic particles from the sun—often collectively referred to as solar wind—crash into gases in Earth’s atmosphere. These collisions produce bursts of light, the colors of which are unique to the identity of each gas: oxygen creates the typical yellow-green aurora, whereas nitrogen makes a blue or purplish one.

All of that energy bouncing around up there is slightly concerning. Satellites that enable text messages and GPS navigation hang out in the same realm, so scientists want to know as much as they can about how this sliver of airspace functions, and ensure that access to the tech is never interrupted.

Over the next two years, AZURE and seven other research missions, together known as The Grand Challenge Initiative, will release canisters of gas into Earth’s upper atmosphere, just as the inaugural spacecraft did last week to produce the image above. Similarly to the elements that color fireworks, the gases NASA ejected into the sky radiate hues that make them visible from Earth’s surface. The way the peculiar plumes of these harmless gasses––trimethylaluminum and a mixture of barium and strontium––disperse can tell scientists more about how energy flows in near-Earth space.

The missions will probe the atmosphere near the north pole. It’s here that Earth’s protective magnetic field curves low, where solar wind can penetrate deep enough to facilitate the beautiful collisions that scramble the chemical and energetic make-up of Earth’s atmosphere.

AZURE focuses on the ionosphere, an electrically charged band of atmosphere that sits between 46 and 621 miles above Earth’s surface. By triangulating the movement of the colored gas clouds from the ground, AZURE will help scientists better understand how this energy moves.

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Millipedes’ exoskeletons glow fluorescent shades of green, yellow, blue, and pink under ultraviolet lights––and so do their genitalia.

This chromatic phenomenon is common among arthropods––the group of invertebrates that includes millipedes, scorpions, spiders, insects, and some marine creatures––and scientists have been using UV lights to study scorpions since the 1950s. That’s where Petra Sierwald, an evolutionary biologist and associate curator at the Field Museum’s Integrative Research Center in Chicago, got the idea to open her drawer of millipede specimens and see which ones glowed in the light. The result was what ’90s black-light poster dreams are made of. It also proved to be scientifically useful.

“Millipedes have had a tough time in research,” says Sierwald. “They’re hard to work with, some are too big for a microscope, and others are hard to see in detail because they’re really small.” But a new UV imaging method, described by Sierwald and colleagues in a study published Thursday in the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society, could help scientists quickly identify nearly-identical species of millipede by getting clearer views of their glimmering genitalia and exoskeletons. Both structures, commonly used to differentiate insect and arachnids, are unique to each millipede species and fluoresce, or light up, under UV lights.

There are over 12,000 existing millipede species. Being able to precisely define more of them—those lurking both in the wild and in museum storage drawers—is important for understanding the arthropods’ biology, and specifically how the sometimes invasive species function in different ecosystems.

When it comes to the glow, it’s the proteins in the gonopods––or reproductive organs––as well as bits of the exoskeleton called cuticles that reflect UV light back to the onlooker in the visible spectrum. Though Sierwald says they aren’t sure why exactly these millipedes glow biologically, she’s quite relieved at how easy and quick it could be to categorize species going forward.

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The new method involves taking a series of images at varying focal lengths using a motorized lift that moves in teeny, tiny increments. Once the images are stitched together, the photos reveal minute details of a leggy creature, like the Pseudopolydesmus canadensis shown above. This species is on the small side, clocking in at roughly two-thirds of an inch long.

The blueish leglike structures in the images below are male millipede gonopods, and actually begin as legs. When male millipedes are in the equivalent of their late-teen years, the legs molt and reveal intermediate tube-like structures. Then, with one more shedding, the former walking legs morph into fully-functioning reproductive organs. Millipedes are blind, so their gorgeous gonopods go unseen by their mates, but the mysterious trait proves useful for scientists. The unique knobs and spikes along the gonad-legs, illuminated in a new (UV) light, reveal which species the millipede belongs to.

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