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Thanks for the bump brityank.

Snopercod: you said
"If you have ever read anything on lightning strikes on fiberglass aircraft, it's pretty scary."

There is word going around about an ion-storm/solar flare, scheduled to reach the earth at approximately 9AMest, coincidental with the re-entry, and the colombia should have been just going from night to day (at that altitude) , and be getting the first rays of sunlight just west of California coast. And this time frame also correlates with the time of the strange supressed 'lightning' photo from the Nikon camera in California.

I see no reference to this from NASA. Is it possible that this may have had something to do with a potential 'lightning' strike?

I am pretty certain that the shuttle has pretty good lightning protection, and has been hit several times before, without damaging it enough to crash it. (LOL - I was going to say 'serious' damage, but who knows what that is anymore?)

My recollection is that sunrise on the ground in CA was between 6:30 and 7 AM PST on 1 Feb. At a 40 mile altitude, sunrise would have been only 10 to 15 minutes earlier. So it's well before sunrise, even at altitude.

Ionization of the atmosphere down to about 60 km altitude (35 miles) occurs at sunrise - it is what kills skywave medium wave radio signals. But I don't think that atmospheric ionization is the culprit. Likewise, if there were a solar flare at that time, the additional ionization is usually centered over the magnetic poles (aurora borealis) and not as far south as CA (I live in San Diego and have never seen the aurora here).

Concerning a "lightning strike" event - I'm pretty sure that the RCC tiles and the black wing tiles are not very electrically conductive. On aircraft, any composite material on potential strike surfaces (nacelles, nose cone, wing tips, etc) has metal fiber screens embedded and jumpers to metallic structure to minimize lightning strike damage. My guess (and only a guess, as I'm not an expert in any of this) is that the lightning protection in the orbiter were designed for the "aerodynamic" portion of the glide and landing, not the "heating" portion of re-entry.

Scientists Seek Clues in Solar Storm That Enveloped Shuttle

A storm of particles and radiation from the Sun, a kind of disturbance that has disabled or destroyed satellites on dozens of occasions, crossed the path of the space shuttle Columbia just as it was making its descent to Earth, scientists said yesterday.