NASA probes 'electric zap' mystery photo:Former astronaut wowed by photo

World Net Daily ^ | February 5, 2003 | Joe Kovacs

[gitmo]

"Wow."

That was astronaut Tammy Jernigan's stunned reaction last night when she viewed a photo of what appears to be space shuttle Columbia getting zapped by a purplish electrical bolt shortly before it disintegrated Saturday morning.


Former astronaut Tammy Jernigan

"It certainly appears very anomalous," Jernigan told the San Francisco Chronicle. "We sure will be very interested in taking a very hard look at this."

The photo was one of five captured by an amateur astronomer in San Francisco who routinely snaps pictures of shuttles when they pass over the Bay area.

The pictures were taken just seven minutes before Columbia's fatal demise.

The Chronicle reports that top investigators of the disaster are now analyzing the startling photograph to try to solve the mystery.

The photographer continues to request his name be withheld, adding he would not release the image publicly until NASA has a chance to study it.

"[The photos] clearly record an electrical discharge like a lightning bolt flashing past, and I was snapping the pictures almost exactly ... when the Columbia may have begun breaking up during re-entry," the photographer originally told the paper Saturday night.

Late yesterday, the space agency sent Jernigan – a former shuttle flyer and now manager at Lawrence Livermore Laboratories – to the astronomer's home to view the image, and have the Nikon camera brought to Houston today.

It was slated to be flown to the Johnson Space Center by a NASA T-38 jet this morning.

Jernigan reportedly asked the astronomer about the f-stop setting on his lens, and how long he kept the shutter open – apparently some four to six seconds. A tripod was used to steady the camera, and the shutter was triggered manually.

"In the critical shot," states the Chronicle, "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."

"I couldn't see the discharge with my own eyes, but it showed up clear and bright on the film when I developed it," the photographer previously said. "But I'm not going to speculate about what it might be."

David Perlman, science editor for the Chronicle, called the photos "indeed puzzling."

"They show a bright scraggly flash of orange light, tinged with pale purple, and shaped somewhat like a deformed L," he wrote.

Space shuttle Columbia's rollout to the launchpad (NASA photo)

Jernigan no longer works for NASA, though she's a veteran of five shuttle missions in the 1990s. Ironically, on her final flight, the orbiter's pilot was Rick Husband, who was at the helm at 9 a.m. EST Saturday when Columbia broke apart during re-entry into the atmosphere.

"He was one of the finest people I could ever hope to know," Jernigan said.

According to her NASA biography, Jernigan graduated from Stanford in 1981 with a bachelor's degree in physics. She went on to earn master's degrees in engineering science and astronomy from Stanford and UC-Berkeley respectively. She also holds a doctorate in space physics and astronomy from Rice University.

She's spent over 63 days above the Earth, completing 1,000 orbits, and having walked in space for nearly eight hours during her final mission aboard shuttle Discovery in 1999.

Before flying on shuttles, she was a research scientist in the theoretical studies branch of NASA Ames Research Center, working on the study of bipolar outflows in the region of star formations, gamma ray bursters and shock-wave phenomena in the interstellar medium.

Regarding the Columbia disaster, the space agency is additionally investigating reports of possible remnants found in the West, including California and Arizona.

"Debris early in the flight path would be critical because that material would obviously be near the start of the events," said Michael Kostelnik, a NASA spaceflight office deputy.

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[TLBSHOW]

It would be two things either an Act of God or a Terrorist attack as I brought up here earlier tonight.....

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/836736/posts?q=1&&page=1#230

on another note

Meteorite 'may have hit shuttle'

http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm_747632.html

[BenLurkin]

"a glowing purple rope of light corkscrews down toward the plasma trail, "

I have heard of certain nations researching earth-based particle beams but this seems to imply a "squiggle" from above.

Would really like to see the photo for myself.

[snickeroon]

Thanks, but actually, I was referring to something different... Here is an exerpt of the original story which I picked up from a Google search using Columbia and red arc. This particular version is from Reuters, via CNN archive, and as you will note, well before Saturday's tragedy:


Thursday, January 23, 2003 Posted: 8:22 PM EST (0122 GMT)



   CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) -- Astronauts videotaping thunderstorms from the space shuttle Columbia captured what scientists said Thursday was a never-before-seen red glowing arc of light paralleling the curve of the Earth.

"Two nights ago over Africa was an extraordinary image. We saw a huge horizontal line of air glow which has been brightened by lightning below it which extended to several hundred miles horizontally and we feel it may be something new," said Dr. Yoav Yair.

Yair, project coordinator for Israeli experiments on board the Columbia in its current mission, said analysis would attempt over the next few weeks to confirm scientists' initial impression that the glow is neither a sprite nor an elf, two other electrical phenomena associated with thunderstorms.

"It is raw data hot from the oven," Yair said. "It's a grainy and noisy image but for scientists it's a treasure trove. That's what we like."

Scientists were excited by the news that astronauts Sunday captured the first-ever pictures of elves taken from space with a calibrated camera. The shuttle and its seven-member crew, which includes Israel's first astronaut, Ilan Ramon, are on a 16-day science mission that began on January 16....




More and more, this is becoming a story of "principalities and powers" of Biblical proportions. P.S., In regards to the claim made that it was a punishment from "god"..... It should be noted that Satan is considered the prince of "air." God loves Israel, and those who offer protection....

Once more, given the story, isn't the patch on the phenomenal side of coincidental?

[deport]

Shows how much I was paying attention.... You'd think the Forum coding would recognize the difference also and thus not except the 0 as a valid replacement for O.

[Cvengr]

discussed with some examples here

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/836319/posts?page=31#31

[DAnconia55]

"In the critical shot," states the Chronicle, "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."

This is NOT Camera error, as was posited earlier.

[DAnconia55]

Or it could be a SYMPTOM of a problem induced by a meteor or foam impact on the TPS

Or it could just be nature throwing the dice and coming up you lose....

[FreedomCalls]

This is NOT Camera error, as was posited earlier.

How do you know? Have you seen the photo?

[TLBSHOW]

or it could be from the problems at NASA

STS 109 March 2002....Columbia suffers a systems failure during pre-test cycling prior to de-orbit burn.
Failure occurs in 4 port RCS thruster pack [pitch/yaw/roll]

[DAnconia55]

Military specialists in Beijing, adds Tai Yang Bao, believe production of the high-tech weapons will begin soon. The new weapons will include supersonic bombers, extra-long-range modified anti-warship missiles, sky-wave and ground-wave over-the-horizon radars, as well as tactical air defense laser weapons and shore-to-warship laser cannon weapons

Hi. I think the Chinese are the greatest military threat we face. But....

Do you have any concept of optics?
There's no way the Chinese could have hit an object over the US with a focused beam weapon, through 4,000 miles of atmosphere.

We couldn't do it, even in my most wet dream. And I personally believe we have ALL KINDS of black projects - some many decades - in advance of general knowledge technology.

And I'm not so sure (And am too lazy to bother calculating) whether they could even SEE an object at that height given the curvature of the Earth...

[DAnconia55]

Could this have been some form of electron beam weapon?

Fired from WHERE?

Next to the descending shuttle in a parallel flight plan??

[BenLurkin]

Except the shuttle has to re-enter along a very narrowly defined path. Assuming they had the mega-watts (or whatever it would take) they could throw the beam into the path and wait for the target to fly into it.

For all that matter, any space faring power could strew debris along the re-entry path and hope for lucky shot.

[DAnconia55]

BTW....

How do you shoot down a plane sized object at 4,000 miles even ASSUMING you have a beam weapon that can hold coherence through 4,000 miles of atmosphere...

AND... track the object while moving at 12,500 mph???

We might as well surrender now, and learn Mandarin. Because they can shoot down every plane or missile we can field.

[hoot2]

"Could this have been some form of electron beam weapon? "

anyone contacted art bell yet?

[Fabozz]

"In the critical shot," states the Chronicle, "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."

All this "toward" and "behind" nonsense is sleight-of-hand from the reporter, just spin to shape the evidence into a form more exciting and newsworthy. This is a single, 4-second exposure, not a movie or video—any motion is inferred, not discerned. There's no way to know whether the purple streak came from the shuttle, went to the shuttle, appeared 4 full seconds in front of the shuttle, 4 seconds behind the shuttle—anything is possible.

For example, here's my interpretation of the picture, every bit as valid as the reporter's: "The shuttle emitted a bright flash. Two bright pieces of debris burst out from the explosion. One corkscrewed upward for a distance, the other flew downward until the turbulence of the shuttle's passage blew it back up into the craft's contrail." A lot of sophisticated computer image analysis might be able to pick between the reporter's just-so story and mine; simply looking at the picture with the naked eye cannot.

[BenLurkin]

See my post 53.

The FROM WHERE question is a good one.

This is all really wild speculation based on questionable photos that none of us have seen, but . . .I fear that the technology is here or will be soon. How to deploy it successfully for this kind of attack would call for some sneaky thinking but even that is not hard to come by.

[blam]

Circular Elves And Blue Jets (Notice normal lightining at the very bottom of the image)

[blu]

This guy used a Nikon 880, a digital camera. It would be interesting to know which "SCENE" he chose.

"Nikon Coolpix 880 Review, Phil Askey, August 2000

Review based on a production Nikon Coolpix 880 (Firmware E880 V1.0)

. The 880 also has a few features the 990 doesn't, most notably the SCENE modes which will make it easy for beginners and more advanced users alike to select a preset shooting mode which puts the camera into the correct setup for shooting a particular scene. In addition to this it appears that the SCENE modes also apply differing colour / contrast settings to achieve a certain "look" depending on which SCENE you've chosen. Scene shooting modes provided: * Portrait * Party/Indoor * Night Portrait * Beach/Snow * Landscape * Sunset * Night Landscape * Fireworks Show * Close up (macro) * Copy (black & white) * Back light"