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the idea that a high altitude lightning strike hit Columbia and the picture that was taken from CA that morning.

Top investigators of the Columbia space shuttle disaster are analyzing a startling photograph -- snapped by an amateur astronomer from a San Francisco hillside -- that appears to show a purplish electrical bolt striking the craft as it streaked across the California sky. Late Tuesday, NASA dispatched former shuttle astronaut Tammy Jernigan, now a manager at Lawrence Livermore Laboratories, to the San Francisco home of the astronomer to examine his digital images and to take the camera itself to Mountain View, where it was to be transported by a NASA T-38 jet to Houston this morning. A Chronicle reporter was present when the astronaut arrived. First seeing the image on a large computer screen, she had one word: "Wow." Jernigan, who is no longer working for NASA, quizzed the photographer on the aperture of the camera, the direction he faced and the estimated exposure time -- about four to six seconds on the automatic Nikon 880 camera. It was mounted on a tripod, and the shutter was triggered manually. In the critical shot, a glowing purple rope of light corkscrews down toward the plasma trail, appears to pass behind it, then cuts sharply toward it from below. As it merges with the plasma trail, the streak itself brightens for a distance, then fades. "It certainly appears very anomalous," said Jernigan. "We sure will be very interested in taking a very hard look at this."

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2003/02/05/MN192153.DTL

The chosen experiment was called "The Mediterranean Israeli Dust Experiment, or MEIDEX. Its purpose was to examine the desert dust phenomena as a crucial factor in the cause for global warming. In addition, a backup experiment was determined and its purpose was to collect data regarding unknown lightning phenomena in heights between 80 and 100 kilometers. The Late Colonel Ilan Ramon and Lieutenant Colonel YitzhakMaio began training towards the shuttle flight in the HustonSpaceCenter on 1998. The experiment chosen was intended to aid the research of global change, a subject now at the front of international atmospheric research. The experiment planned by a team of researchers from the geophysics and planetary science department in the Tel-AvivUniversity, was preformed on 2003, on the space shuttle "Colombia", flight STS-107, for a period of 16 days. Sadly, the trip's end was disastrous, and the "Colombia" and its seven crewmembers were destroyed when the shuttle entered the atmosphere. During the experiment, the shuttle circled earth in an height of 278 Km, every hour and a half, passing over the Mediterranean twice or three times a day in daylight. The Late Ilan Ramon was elected to perform the experiment. When the shuttle passed over our area, he took several photos of aerosols in various wave-lengths (tiny particles hovering in the atmosphere, and usually come from the desert – dust storms of sorts), by using a custom made camera, designed by the Israeli research team. Aerosols come mainly from the Sahara and hover towards the Mediterranean and AtlanticOceans, and greatly influence global warming. This is why NASA invests such efforts to measure their concentration via its satellite. The Israeli experiments also included the collection of aerosol samples from within the photographed clouds, using an Israeli aircraft. The experiment was supposed to enable NASA to calibrate its measurements and to contribute to the improvement of Sun Radiation Atmospheric Penetration modules and to the forecast of global climate changes. In addition, the Israeli astronaut also monitored a new phenomenon in the upper atmosphere, recently discovered during lightning storms, called "Sprites" in the scientific jargon. The shuttle flight also included an experiment which involved junior high school students from the Ort school in KiryatMotzkin. The intention of this experiment is to prove that certain physical phenomena we are familiar with, act differently in zero-g condition than on earth.