The European Space Agency (ESA) is Europe’s gateway to space. Its mission is to shape the development of Europe’s space capability and ensure that investment in space continues to deliver benefits to the citizens of Europe and the world.
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ESA astronaut Andreas Mogensen managed to capture a red sprite during his Huginn mission as part of the Thor-Davis experiment from Danish Technical University (DTU). A red sprite is a Transient Luminous Event (TLE) which is a group of rare events that happens around thunderclouds, usually seen as colorful lightning shooting upwards towards space.
The Davis camera works more like the human eye, than a regular camera. It does not take pictures, but senses the changes in light and contract to create an image. This allows the camera to take the equivalent of 100 000 pictures per second, making it possible to capture the lightning.