Every few seconds a "snowball" the size of a small house breaks up as it approaches Earth and deposits a large cloud of water vapor in Earth's upper atmosphere. On August 3rd, 1981 a Delta rocket lifted off from Vandenberg Air Force Base carrying a pair of NASA satellites, both known as Dynamics Explorer, into elliptical orbits. One of these satellites circles the poles of Earth at an altitude ranging from 350 miles to 14,500 miles. This satellite was designed to examine Earth for certain light