Have you ever wondered about the many experiments taking place in the International Space Station (ISS)? What do astronauts study in orbit in this laboratory?
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Well, many things of course, but one of them is the weather: especially the kind of weather events that cannot be seen from Earth. These are called blue jets and elves (short for Emissions of Light and Very Low Frequency Perturbations to Electromagnetic Pulse Sources), and their monitoring is enabled by a European tool called the Atmosphere-Space Interactions Monitor (ASIM) observatory.
Installed on the Space Station in 2018, ASIM consists of a collection of optical cameras, photometers, and an X-ray and gamma-ray detector, and is there to detect electrical discharges from weather conditions that can only be observed in space. Understanding these galactic weather events is crucial to understanding not only Earth’s weather, but the concentration of greenhouse gases in Earth’s atmosphere.
What are Elves and Blue Jets?
But what are blue jets and elves? Blue jets, as their name implies, are streams of blue-colored lightning that do not head towards land, but instead shoot upwards 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 jets were spotted by ASIM near Nauru, a small island in the central Pacific Ocean, on February 26, 2019. They are now described in an article published in Nature on January 20, 2021. The study details these events and captures their awe-inspiring beauty, even without the use of images.
It’s definitely worth reading if you’re a fan of space phenomena. It is also indicative of all that we have yet to discover on our precious planet.
“This article is an impressive culmination of the many new phenomena ASIM is observing over thunderstorms and shows that we still have so much to discover and learn about our universe,” said Astrid Orr, ESA’s Physical Sciences Coordinator for Human and Robotic Space Flight. .