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What’s Made in a Thunderstorm and Faster Than Lightning? Gamma Rays!
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By European Space Agency
ESA engineers have focused microscopes, hardness testers and an X-ray computer aided tomography machine onto a special aluminium weld just a single centimetre across – the historic result of the very first autonomous welding to be performed in space, and the first ESA has been involved with.
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By USH
Many unusual phenomena are witnessed in the sky, ranging from UFOs and mysterious orbs to figures from parallel universes. One notable incident occurred during a recent thunderstorm from an unknown location when amidst the raging storm, a powerful flash of lightning illuminates the night sky, revealing the haunting silhouette of a demon, caught mid-air.
While this eerie vision was likely a result of the lightning itself, some claim it resembled Raijin, the Shinto god of lightning and thunder, a chaotic being born of death who brings the world vital rains as well as chaos and destruction .
Regardless of the true nature of this event, it serves as a reminder that countless mysterious phenomena exist on and around our planet. Whether tied to the afterlife, parallel universes, intelligent extraterrestrial life, or folklore with roots in truth, most of these occurrences remain unexplained.
Link to the short video posted on TikTok:https://www.tiktok.com/@nc_batman_official/video/7417359739828440351/ View the full article
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By NASA
Earth (ESD)Earth Home Explore Climate Change Science in Action Multimedia Data For Researchers 4 min read
Via NASA Plane, Scientists Find New Gamma-ray Emission in Storm Clouds
Tropical thunderstorm with lightning, near the airport of Santa Marta, Colombia. Credit: Oscar van der Velde There’s more to thunderclouds than rain and lightning. Along with visible light emissions, thunderclouds can produce intense bursts of gamma rays, the most energetic form of light, that last for millionths of a second. The clouds can also glow steadily with gamma rays for seconds to minutes at a time.
Researchers using NASA airborne platforms have now found a new kind of gamma-ray emission that’s shorter in duration than the steady glows and longer than the microsecond bursts. They’re calling it a flickering gamma-ray flash. The discovery fills in a missing link in scientists’ understanding of thundercloud radiation and provides new insights into the mechanisms that produce lightning. The insights, in turn, could lead to more accurate lightning risk estimates for people, aircraft, and spacecraft.
Researchers from the University of Bergen in Norway led the study in collaboration with scientists from NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory, and multiple universities in the U.S., Mexico, Colombia, and Europe. The findings were described in a pair of papers in Nature, published Oct. 2.
The international research team made their discovery while flying a battery of detectors aboard a NASA ER-2 research aircraft. In July 2023, the ER-2 set out on a series of 10 flights from MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Florida. The plane flew figure-eight flight patterns a few miles above tropical thunderclouds in the Caribbean and Central America, providing unprecedented views of cloud activity.
The scientific payload was developed for the Airborne Lightning Observatory for Fly’s Eye Geostationary Lightning Mapper Simulator and Terrestrial Gamma-ray Flashes (ALOFT) campaign. Instrumentation in the payload included weather radars along with multiple sensors for measuring gamma rays, lightning flashes, and microwave emissions from clouds.
NASA’s high-flying ER-2 airplane carries instrumentation in this artist’s impression of the ALOFT mission to record gamma rays (colored purple for illustration) from thunderclouds.Credit: NASA/ALOFT team The researchers had hoped ALOFT instruments would observe fast radiation bursts known as terrestrial gamma-ray flashes (TGFs). The flashes, first discovered in 1992 by NASA’s Compton Gamma Ray Observatory spacecraft, accompany some lightning strikes and last only millionths of a second. Despite their high intensity and their association with visible lightning, few TGFs have been spotted during previous aircraft-based studies.
“I went to a meeting just before the ALOFT campaign,” said principal investigator Nikolai Østgaard, a space physicist with the University of Bergen. “And they asked me: ‘How many TGFs are you going to see?’ I said: ‘Either we’ll see zero, or we’ll see a lot.’ And then we happened to see 130.”
However, the flickering gamma-ray flashes were a complete surprise.
“They’re almost impossible to detect from space,” said co-principal investigator Martino Marisaldi, who is also a University of Bergen space physicist. “But when you are flying at 20 kilometers [12.5 miles] high, you’re so close that you will see them.” The research team found more than 25 of these new flashes, each lasting between 50 to 200 milliseconds.
The abundance of fast bursts and the discovery of intermediate-duration flashes could be among the most important thundercloud discoveries in a decade or more, said University of New Hampshire physicist Joseph Dwyer, who was not involved in the research. “They’re telling us something about how thunderstorms work, which is really important because thunderstorms produce lightning that hurts and kills a lot of people.”
More broadly, Dwyer said he is excited about the prospects of advancing the field of meteorology. “I think everyone assumes that we figured out lightning a long time ago, but it’s an overlooked area … we don’t understand what’s going on inside those clouds right over our heads.” The discovery of flickering gamma-ray flashes may provide crucial clues scientists need to understand thundercloud dynamics, he said.
Turning to aircraft-based instrumentation rather than satellites ensured a lot of bang for research bucks, said the study’s project scientist, Timothy Lang of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.
“If we had gotten one flash, we would have been ecstatic — and we got well over 100,” he said. This research could lead to a significant advance in our understanding of thunderstorms and radiation from thunderstorms. “It shows that if you have the right problem and you’re willing to take a little bit of risk, you can have a huge payoff.”
By James Riordon
NASA’s Earth Science News Team
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Last Updated Oct 02, 2024 EditorJenny MarderContactJames RiordonLocationMarshall Space Flight Center Related Terms
Earth Gamma Rays Goddard Space Flight Center View the full article
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By European Space Agency
Over the nearly 70 years of spaceflight, about 10 000 intact satellites and rocket bodies have reentered the atmosphere with many more to follow. Yet for such a ubiquitous event, we still lack a clear view on what actually happens to a satellite during its fiery last moments.
ESA is preparing the Destructive Reentry Assessment Container Object (Draco) mission that will collect unique measurements during an actual reentry and breakup of a satellite from the inside. A capsule especially designed to survive the destruction will transmit the valuable telemetry shortly after.
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By NASA
Credit: NASA NASA, on behalf of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), has selected Lockheed Martin Corp. of Littleton, Colorado, to develop a lightning mapping instrument as part of NOAA’s Geostationary Extended Observations (GeoXO) satellite program.
This cost-plus-award-fee contract is valued at approximately $297.1 million. It includes the development of two flight instruments as well as options for two additional units. The anticipated period of performance for this contract includes support for 10 years of on-orbit operations and five years of on-orbit storage, for a total of 15 years for each flight model. The work will take place at Lockheed Martin’s facilities in Sunnyvale, California, and Littleton, Colorado, NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
The GeoXO Lightning Mapper will detect, locate, and measure the intensity, duration, and extent of lightning flashes. The instrument will continue critical observations provided by the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellites-R (GOES-R) Series Geostationary Lightning Mapper. Data from Lightning Mapper will be used to analyze severe storms, increase warning lead time for hazardous weather, and provide earlier indications of impending lightning strikes to the ground. The data will also be used for hurricane intensity prediction, wildfire detection and response, precipitation estimation, and to mitigate aviation hazards.
Forecasters need lightning information from geostationary orbit because the data are available where other sources are more limited, especially over oceans and in mountainous and rural areas. The data are also available more frequently than local radar and fill in radar coverage gaps.
The contract scope includes the tasks and deliverables necessary to design, analyze, develop, fabricate, integrate, test, verify, and evaluate the lightning mapper instrument in addition to supporting the launch; supplying and maintaining the instrument ground support equipment; and supporting mission operations at the NOAA Satellite Operations Facility in Suitland, Maryland.
The GeoXO Program is the follow-on to the GOES-R Series Program. The GeoXO satellite system will advance Earth observations from geostationary orbit. The mission will supply vital information to address major environmental challenges of the future in support of weather, ocean, and climate operations in the United States. The advanced capabilities from GeoXO will help address our changing planet and the evolving needs of the nation’s data users. Both NASA and NOAA are working to ensure these critical observations are in place by the early 2030s when the GOES-R Series nears the end of its operational lifetime.
Together, NOAA and NASA oversee the development, launch, testing, and operation of all the satellites in the GeoXO Program. NOAA funds and manages the program, operations, and data products. On behalf of NOAA, NASA and commercial partners develop and build the instruments and spacecraft and launch the satellites.
For more information on the GeoXO program, visit:
https://www.nesdis.noaa.gov/geoxo
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Liz Vlock
Headquarters, Washington
202-358-1600
elizabeth.a.vlock@nasa.gov
Jeremy Eggers
Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
757-824-2958
jeremy.l.eggers@nasa.gov
John Leslie
NOAA’s National Environmental Satellite, Data, and Information Service
202-527-3504
nesdis.pa@noaa.gov
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Last Updated Sep 17, 2024 EditorJessica TaveauLocationNASA Headquarters Related Terms
Goddard Space Flight Center GOES (Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite) GOES-R Kennedy Space Center View the full article
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