Recent Photographs Capturing Unusual Thunderstorms
Every Saturday, Andreas would take the camera from the Space Station, attach the Davis camera on top, and go to the Cupola to check for thunderstorms on Earth. The initial picture has been released.
Not Easy
Andreas successfully took a picture of a red sprite, which is a type of flashy event in the sky during thunderstorms known as a Transient Luminous Event (TLE). These events happen above thunderclouds, somewhere between 40 and 80 kilometers above the ground. Scientists estimate that the red sprite he captured is around 14 by 26 kilometers in size based on the image and video. Red sprites are usually difficult to study from the ground because they form above thunder clouds. To observe them, scientists often rely on tools in space, such as the Atmosphere-Space Interactions Monitor (ASIM) on the outside of the Space Station. Although some red sprites have been spotted from the ground, it’s not very common.
The Capture Happened in the Blink of an Eye.
The Davis camera is special because it’s like our eyes – it notices changes in contrast instead of taking a single picture like a normal camera. It uses very little power, just a few watts, yet can take as many as 100,000 pictures in a second. You can see how fast it is in the video below, where it captures a lightning strike and the red sprite forming quickly.
Andreas did an amazing job with these pictures. The Davis camera is great, providing the high-speed details we need to capture the fast events in lightning, as mentioned by Olivier Chanrion, the lead scientist for this experiment and a senior researcher at DTU Space.
Relying on Thor’s Strength
The Thor-Davis experiment is looking into lightning in the upper atmosphere and how it could impact greenhouse gasses. It continues the work of the earlier Thor experiment during Andreas’s first mission in 2015, where he also took pictures of another kind of thunder event, a blue jet, shooting into space. The Danish Technical University (DTU) and ESA are leading this experiment together.
Read the Original Article: ESA
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