Of course they are. "I swear to God that it was a Sprite."
NASA was in radio contact with the shuttle throughout. Had the commander experienced this phenomenon he would have said so. If the Sprite had occurred during the last radio transmission, NASA should have heard it. Maybe they did, and they're not talking about it. As for my own prognosis, I believe that the wing damage scenario is much more likely than a Sprite. The evidence as currently known points heavily in that direction, a direction that NASA officials would sooner not travel.
Revelation 10:1-4
1 And I saw another mighty angel come down from heaven, clothed with a cloud: and a rainbow was upon his head, and his face was as it were the sun, and his feet as pillars of fire:
2 And he had in his hand a little book open: and he set his right foot upon the sea, and his left foot on the earth,
3 And cried with a loud voice, as when a lion roareth: and when he had cried, seven thunders uttered their voices.
4 And when the seven thunders had uttered their voices, I was about to write: and I heard a voice from heaven saying unto me, Seal up those things which the seven thunders uttered, and write them not.
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Lightning between
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ILLUSTRATIONS: |
Since ancient times, lightning has both awed and fascinated people with its splendor and might. The early Greeks, for instance, associated the lightning bolt with Zeus, their most powerful god. And even after a modern understanding of the electrical nature of lightning developed, certain mysteries persisted. Many observers described luminous displays flickering through the upper reaches of the night sky. Some of these curiosities could be explained as auroras or weirdly illuminated clouds, but others were more baffling. In particular, pilots flying through the darkness occasionally observed strange flashes above thunderstorms. But the scientific community largely regarded these reports as apocryphal--until 1990, when John R. Winckler and his colleagues at the University of Minnesota first captured one of these enigmatic phantoms using a video camera. Their images revealed lightning of a completely new configuration.
Winckler's achievement ushered in a flurry of activity to document such high-altitude electrical phenomena. And hundreds of similar observations--from the space shuttle, from aircraft and from the ground--have since followed. The result has been a growing appreciation that lightninglike effects are not at all restricted to the lower atmospheric layers sandwiched between storm clouds and the ground. Indeed, scientists now realize that electrical discharges take place regularly in the rarefied air up to 90 kilometers above thunderclouds. It is remarkable that these events, many of which are visible to the naked eye, went undiscovered for so long. In retrospect, the existence of some form of lightning high in the atmosphere should not have come as a surprise to scientists. They have long known that well above the turbulent parts of the atmosphere, ultraviolet rays from the sun strike gas molecules and knock electrons loose from them. This process forms the ionosphere, an electrically conductive layer that encircles the earth. Large differences in voltage can exist between storm clouds and the ionosphere, just as they do between clouds and the ground. Impelled by such enormous voltages, lightning can invade either zone when the air--which is typically an electrical insulator--breaks down and provides a conductive path for electric currents to follow.
Because the atmosphere becomes less dense with increasing altitude, the lightning that happens at greater heights involves fewer air molecules and produces colors not seen in typical discharges. Usually they appear red and are only faintly visible. Thus, researchers must employ sensitive video cameras to record these events against the backdrop of the darkened night sky. The feebleness of the light given off and the transient nature of such emissions combine to present severe technical challenges to the researchers involved in studying these ghostly atmospheric events. Nevertheless, in just a few years investigators have made considerable progress in understanding them.
The newly discovered electrical events of the upper atmosphere fall into four categories. Two types of high-level lightning, termed sprites and elves, appear (despite their fanciful names) to be manifestations of well-understood atmospheric physics. The causes for the other two varieties, called blue jets and gamma-ray events, remain more speculative. But our research group and many others around the world are still amassing our observations in hopes of deciphering the physical mechanisms driving these strange occurrences as well. Until that time, we must admit something like the ancient sense of awe and wonder when we contemplate these curious bursts of energy that dance through the ethereal world between earth and space. Further Reading DISCOVERY OF INTENSE GAMMA-RAY FLASHES OF ATMOSPHERIC ORIGIN. G. J. Fishman, P. N. Bhat, R. Mallozzi, J. M. Horack, T. Koshut, C. Kouveliotou, G. N. Pendleton, C. A. Meegan, R. B. Wilson, W. S. Paciesas, S. J. Goodman and H. J. Christian in Science, Vol. 264, pages 1313-1316; May 27, 1994. PRELIMINARY RESULTS FROM THE SPRITES94 AIRCRAFT CAMPAIGN, 1: RED SPRITES. D. D. Sentman, E. M. Wescott, D. L. Osborne, D. L. Hampton and M. J. Heavner in Geophysical Research Letters, Vol. 22, No. 10, pages 1205-1208; May 15, 1995. PRELIMINARY RESULTS FROM THE SPRITES94 AIRCRAFT CAMPAIGN, 2: BLUE JETS. E. M. Wescott, D. Sentman, D. Osborne, D. Hampton and M. Heavner in Geophysical Research Letters, Vol. 22, No. 10, pages 1209-1212; May 15, 1995. ELVES: LIGHTNING-INDUCED TRANSIENT LUMINOUS EVENTS IN THE LOWER IONOSPHERE. H. Fukunishi, Y. Takahashi, M. Kubota, K. Sakanoi, U. S. Inan and W. A. Lyons in Geophysical Research Letters, Vol. 23, No. 16, pages 2157-2160; August 1, 1996. Related Links Sprites, Q-Bursts and Positive Ground Strokes Walter Lyons' Handy Weather Answer Book
The Authors STEPHEN B. MENDE, DAVIS D. SENTMAN and EUGENE M. WESCOTT have spent much of their time during recent years investigating curious electrical activity of the upper atmosphere. Mende received a Ph.D. in physics from Imperial College at the University of London in 1965. From 1967 to 1996 he worked for Lockheed Palo Alto Research Laboratory. Mende is currently a fellow at the space sciences laboratory of the University of California, Berkeley. Sentman studied space physics under James Van Allen at the University of Iowa, where he earned his doctorate in 1976. After 14 years at the University of California, Los Angeles, Sentman joined the physics department at the University of Alaska-Fairbanks, where he now serves on the faculty. Wescott received a Ph.D. in geophysics from the University of Alaska-Fairbanks in 1964. He worked for three years at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland before returning to the University of Alaska-Fairbanks as a professor of geophysics. |
SPRITES are high-altitude luminous flashes that take place above thunderstorms in a part of the atmosphere called the mesosphere. Although sprites are usually rare, some storms can spawn them frequently. Typically the upper parts of clouds are charged positively and the lower parts negatively. Most often, it is the negative base of the cloud that flashes to the ground. But at times the upper, positive part can discharge directly to the earth, producing a lightning flash of exceptional intensity. About one out of 20 such positive cloud-to-ground lightning bolts are sufficiently energetic that they spawn sprites. These examples, recorded from the ground with a monochromatic video camera, have been colorized to match a color image obtained from an aircraft.
LIGHTNING (below, left) usually carries negative charge from the base of a cloud down to the earth. Sometimes powerful strokes (center) cause the positive charge that had built up near the top of the cloud to disappear abruptly. The large electrical field (gradation in color) created between the cloud top and the ionosphere pulls electrons upward, where they collide with gas molecules. If the electrical field is sufficiently strong and the air sufficiently thin, the electrons will accelerate unimpeded and reach the velocity needed to transfer their kinetic energy to the electronic structure of the molecules with which they collide, raising such molecules to an "excited state." The excited molecules give away their newly acquired energy by the emission of light, causing sprites (below, right). They typically span from 50 to 90 kilometers altitude.
