• European Space Agency (ESA) astronaut Andreas Mogensen captured an  image of a red sprite. 

• A red sprite is a Transient Luminous Event (TLE) which is a group of rare events that happens around thunderclouds, usually seen as colourful lightning shooting upwards towards space.

• The red sprite appears above a thundercloud for only a fraction of a second. 

• Equipped with a specialised event-based camera, he took pictures of the thunderclouds in the Thor-Davis experiment. 

Huginn mission and Davis camera

• Mogensen reached the International Space Station for his second mission — Huginn — in August 2023. He will stay for six months, his first long duration mission after his 10-day mission in 2015. 

• Mogensen is filming thunderstorms and lightning as part of the Huginn mission.

• Andreas is using a Space Station camera with a device on top to take pictures of thunderstorms from the European-built Cupola windows. The experiment is led by Denmark’s largest space research institute DTU Space.

• The additional camera on top is the Davis camera that uses “event-based” technology. Instead of taking images by collecting light through the camera shutter, the camera measures differences in light and uses that information to create an image. 

• The Davis camera works more like the human eye, than a regular camera. It does not take pictures, but senses the changes in light and contract to create an image. This allows the camera to take the equivalent of 100,000 pictures per second, making it possible to capture the lightning.

Transient Luminous Events

• Large thunderstorms are capable of producing other kinds of electrical phenomena called Transient Luminous Events (TLEs) that occur high in the atmosphere. 

• They are rarely observed visually and not well understood. The most common TLEs include red sprites, blue jets, and elves.

• Sprites can appear directly above an active thunderstorm as a large but weak discharge. They usually happen at the same time as powerful positive cloud-to-ground lightning (CG) lightning strokes. 

• They can extend up to 60 miles from the cloud top. 

• Sprites are mostly red and usually last no more than a few seconds, and their shapes are described as resembling jellyfish, carrots, or columns. 

• Because sprites are not very bright, they can only be seen at night. They are rarely seen with the human eye, so they are most often imaged with highly sensitive cameras.

• Blue jets and gigantic jets emerge from the top of the thundercloud, but are not directly associated with cloud-to-ground lightning. They extend up in narrow cones fanning out and disappearing at heights of 25-35 miles. 

• Gigantic jets go even higher to the ionosphere. 

• Blue jets last a fraction of a second and have been witnessed by pilots.

• Elves are rapidly expanding disk-shaped regions of glowing that can be up to 300 miles across. They last less than a thousandth of a second, and occur above areas of active cloud to ground lightning. 

• Elves result when an energetic electromagnetic pulse extends up into the ionosphere. 

• Elves were discovered in 1992 by a low-light video camera on the Space Shuttle, and are now known to be associated with terrestrial gamma ray flashes (TGFs).

Manorama Yearbook app is now available on Google Play Store and iOS App Store