New images of rare thunder
ESA astronaut Andreas Mogensen has captured images of rare thunder phenomena as part of the Thor-Davis experiment on his Huginn mission.
Taken with expert timing
Every Saturday Andreas grabbed the Space Station’s camera, mounted the Davis camera on top and headed to the Cupola to look out for thunderstorms on Earth. The first image is now out.
Andreas managed to capture a red sprite, a thunderous phenomenon called Transient Luminous Event (TLE), that takes place above thunderclouds, between 40 and 80 kilometres over the ground. From the image and the video, he captured, scientists estimate that the size of the red sprite is roughly 14 by 26 km. As the red sprites form above thunder clouds, they are not easily studied from ground and are therefore mostly seen from space, including using the Atmosphere-Space Interactions Monitor (ASIM) that sits on the outside of the Space Station. However few sprites have been seen from the ground.
That shot was fast as lightning
The Davis camera is an event camera, which works more like the human eye, sensing change in contrast instead of capturing an image like a regular camera. The power draw of an event camera is very low, on the order of a few watts while still being able to take the equivalent of 100 000 pictures a second. The speed of the camera is evident from the video below where you see the thunder strike below and then the red sprite form above.
“These images taken by Andreas are fantastic. The Davis camera works well and gives us the high temporal resolution necessary to capture the quick processes in the lightning,” said Olivier Chanrion, lead scientist for this experiment and DTU Space senior researcher.
Standing on the shoulders of Thor
The Thor-Davis experiment investigates lightning in the upper atmosphere and how it might affect the concentration of greenhouse gasses. It builds upon the former Thor experiment from Andreas’s first mission in 2015, when he also captured images of a different thunder event shooting up towards space, a blue jet,. The experiment is led by Danish Technical University (DTU) together with ESA.
Follow Andreas’s updates from space on social media and visit the Huginn page for more news on his mission and the science he performs on the International Space Station.