Have you ever wondered about the many experiments taking place at the International Space Station (ISS)? What are astronauts studying in this orbiting laboratory?
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Well, a lot of things, of course, but one of them is the weather: especially the kind of weather events that can’t be seen from Earth. These are called blue jets and elves (short for very low light emission and interference due to electromagnetic pulse sources), and their monitoring is possible by a European instrument called the Atmosphere-Space Interactions Monitor (ASIM).
ASIM, installed in the space station in 2018, consists of a collection of optical cameras, photometers and an X-ray and gamma detector and is there to detect electrical discharges from meteorological events that can only be observed in space. Understanding these galactic meteorological events is crucial to understanding not only the weather on Earth, but also the concentration of greenhouse gases in the Earth’s atmosphere.
What are elves and blue jets?
But what are blue planes and elves? Blue jets, as their name suggests, are streams of blue lightning that do not go ashore, but instead pull up into space. As the pictures show, they are quite beautiful to look at.
Elves, on the other hand, are light emissions that appear as rapidly expanding rings in the ionosphere.
Both elves and blue planes were spotted by ASIM on February 26, 2019 near Nauru, a small island in the central Pacific Ocean. These have now been described in a paper published in The nature on January 20, 2021. The study describes these events in detail capturing their stunning beauty, even without the use of images.
Definitely worth reading if you are a fan of space phenomena. It is also indicative of all that remains to be discovered on our precious planet.
“This paper is an impressive culmination of many new phenomena that ASIM is observing over storms and shows that we still have so much to discover and learn about our universe,” said Astrid Orr, ESA’s coordinator for the physical sciences. for human and robotic space flight. .