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

"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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This is dubious as a possible cause, but it is related to high atmosphere electrical discharge.
I say its unlikely because this occurs in the presence of storms. if you can take a picture of the shuttle it would seem that there would be no storms in the area. It does show the possibility of electrical discharge pretty high up in the atmosphere. Posted for interests sake.

http://science.nasa.gov/newhome/headlines/images/licae/sprites.htm

_________________________________________________________

Sprites and jets

Reports of strange bursts of colored light
coming out of the tops of powerful
thunderstorms date back to the 1800s. And
even though aircraft pilots reported them in
the 1950s and '60s, they remained unconfirmed
until recently.

These weird flashes were first observed from
the ground, when, quite by accident, they were
captured on video on July 5, 1989 by University
of Minnesota scientists John Winckler, Robert
Franz and Robert Nemzek. The scientists were
actually performing a calibration test for a low
light level monochrome camera, and weren't
particularly looking at the thunderstorm to the
east of their observing site at all. The next
morning, while viewing the test video, they
saw giant twin pillars of light extending
upward more than 30 kilometers above the
thunderstorm.

The flashes were first recorded from space by
the Space Shuttle (STS-34), as it passed over a
highly active thunderstorm in northern
Australia on Oct. 21, 1989. The shuttle's
monochrome TV cameras filmed what are now
called sprites and jets for the first time from
space. The observations were being conducted
as part of the NASA/Marshall Mesoscale
Lightning Observation Experiment. Otha H.
Vaughan, Jr., of NASA's Global Hydrology Center
was the principal investigator.

In 1994, while flying an extremely sensitive
color camera normally used for auroral
photography in a high altitude aircraft,
University of Alaska scientists confirmed that
the flashes have a generally reddish color
which often fades to purple or blue in the
downward extending tendrils. Dr. Davis
Sentman of UAF named these "sprites" after the
creatures in Shakespeare's "The Tempest," in
part because of their transient, ephemeral
nature. The UAF team also discovered and
named blue jets.

The sprites appear high above the
thunderstorm while the jets shoot out from the
top of the thunderstorm. Sprites appear to
cascade as high as 96 km (60 mi) above the
Earth. Sprites can look like giant red blobs,
picket fences, upward branching carrots, or
tentacled octopi, and can occur singly or in
clusters. The jets appear to be ejected from the
storm top with velocities as high as 100 km per
sec and move up as high as 32 kilometers.

There are two common theories about the
formation of lightning. One is that lightning is
merely an atmospheric breakdown that
creates low-energy electrons, which, in turn,
excite the air to fluoresce. A second theory
holds that the air can break down over large
distances, generating 1 million times the
energy per electron, and that those electrons,
when they stop in the atmosphere, produce
gamma rays. The latter theory is supported by
the Burst and Transient Source Experiment
(BATSE) aboard the Compton Gamma Ray
Observatory which has detected gamma rays
coming up from the Earth - not deep space -
when the spacecraft was over thunderstorms.

Researchers want to know what effect upward
lightning may have on future commercial
aviation operations and high altitude balloon
research flights in the stratosphere. The
Boeing 777 already can fly to 18 km (60,000 ft),
and future aircraft will fly even higher.

____________________________________________________
If you like this abstract see this more complete article:

http://science.nasa.gov/newhome/headlines/essd10jun99%5F1.htm

It has photos of the phenomena to (Helpful to people like me.)

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