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Have you ever wondered about the many experiences taking place on the International Space Station (ISS)? What are the astronauts studying in this orbiting lab?
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Well, a lot of things of course, but one of them is the weather: specifically the kind of weather events that can’t be seen from Earth. These are called blue jets, and elves (short for Emissions of Light and Very Low Frequency Perturbations due to Electromagnetic Pulse Sources), and their monitoring is made possible by a European tool 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 due to weather events which can only be spotted in the space. Understanding these galactic weather events is crucial to understanding not only the weather on Earth, but also the concentration of greenhouse gases in Earth’s atmosphere.
What are elves and blue jets?
But what are the blue jets and the elves? Blue jets, as the name suggests, are blue-colored lightning currents that do not point towards the earth but shoot upwards into space. As the pictures show, they are quite beautiful to see.
Elves, on the other hand, are light emissions that appear as rapidly expanding rings in the ionosphere.
Elves and blue jets were spotted by ASIM on February 26, 2019 near Nauru, a small island in the central Pacific Ocean. They have now been described in an article published in Nature on January 20, 2021. The study describes these events in detail, capturing their awe-inspiring beauty even without the use of images.
Definitely worth reading if you are a fan of space phenomena. It is also revealing of how much we still have to discover on our precious planet.
“This article is a very impressive moment of the many new phenomena that ASIM is observing above thunderstorms and shows that we still have so much to discover and learn about our Universe,” said Astrid Orr, coordinator of physical sciences at the ‘ESA for human and robotic spaceflight.
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