As part of the Thor-Davis experiment on the International Space Station (ISS), ESA astronaut Andreas Mogensen has captured images of a phenomenon called red sprite.
Equipped with a specialized event-based camera, ESA astronaut Andreas Mogensen managed to capture this picture of a red sprite in October 2023. Image credit: ESA / DTU / A. Mogensen.
The Thor-Davis experiment investigates lightning in the upper atmosphere and how it might affect the concentration of greenhouse gasses.
The experiment is led by Danish Technical University (DTU) together with ESA.
It builds upon the former Thor experiment from Andreas Mogensen’s first mission in 2015, when he also captured images of a different thunder event shooting up towards space, a blue jet.
“These images taken by Andreas are fantastic,” said Olivier Chanrion, lead scientist for the Thor-Davis experiment and senior researcher at DTU Space.
“The Davis camera works well and gives us the high temporal resolution necessary to capture the quick processes in the lightning.”
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 ISS.
However few sprites have been seen from the ground.
The Atmosphere-Space Interactions Monitor (ASIM) is a collection of optical cameras, photometers and an X- and gamma-ray detector designed to look for electrical discharges born in stormy weather conditions that extend above thunderstorms into the upper atmosphere. Image credit: ESA.
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.
The red sprite imaged by Andreas Mogensen was roughly 14 by 26 km (8.7 by 16.2 miles) in size.
It occurred above thunderclouds, between 40 and 80 km (25 and 50 miles) over the ground.
