From hard core scientists to backyard enthusiasts and even microbreweries.

It seems like the entire country was anticipating today's event.

Over the next 30 minutes, we'll discuss how the eclipse is impacting places like here in Paducah and what experts are looking for during this rare phenomenon.

That begins with Nassau, which launched rockets during today's eclipse, all for the sake of science.

Our Christy Dalton finds out what Nassau hopes to learn from these eclipse experiments and how we might benefit down here on Earth.

While many of us will have our sights set on the sky, scientists across the U.S. will have their sights set on discovering something new from this eclipse.

Joining us now is Dr. Lisa Winter from NASA.

Dr. Winter, thank you for being here.

Okay.

What is NASA hoping to find out from this celestial event?

And so we have a number of science experiments going on during the eclipse to study the solar corona.

One thing about the eclipses, we can study the very inner solar corona, which you can't see except during an eclipse.

And we're going to study ionospheric effects.

So that is an outer layer of the atmosphere that conducts electricity is very important to space weather.

And we have a number of projects going to to study both of those phenomena.

Well, how do you study the ionosphere?

How are you all going to conduct that experiment?

Yeah, we have a really great experiment that is going to send up three rockets from Wallops Island in Virginia.

The rockets are going to go up before the eclipse, slightly before the eclipse, during the eclipse and then slightly after the eclipse.

They're going to have a scientific payload on there that separates and measures the temperature and the density in in the atmosphere in the ionosphere.

And they're coordinating it with balloons as well.

So there'll be balloons and and rocket payloads that that are going to track temperatures and densities and look for ripples in the ionosphere during the eclipse.

So what will those scientific measurements tell us?

What will how will that help us?

Yeah, that's a great question.

So the ionosphere is really important to space weather.

If there is a big solar storm, it causes basically a current through the ionosphere that can induce currents further down.

So any kind of long conducting wire like our power grids or oil pipelines, they're going to be affected by solar storms and these currents that are in the ionosphere, they can cause blackouts.

There's been a really widespread blackout in 1989 in Quebec that was caused by a solar storm.

And so we want to understand this process better.

Also, the ionosphere is important for high frequency communications.

So if aircraft are flying, for instance, over the ocean, they need to use the ionosphere to communicate.

So they can have blackouts during solar storms.

So So this kind of research will help us to understand all of those effects better.

The next total solar eclipse in the US is not until 2044.

So these experiments are rare opportunity for NASA's scientists to collect data that could predict disruptions in wireless communication networks.