Have you ever wondered about the many experiments taking place at the International Space Station (ISS)? What are astronauts studying in this orbital laboratory?
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Well, many things are natural, but one of them is the weather: especially the kind of weather conditions that cannot be seen from the earth. It’s called blue rays and elves (abbreviation for light emissions and very low frequency interference due to electromagnetic pulse sources), and their monitoring is made possible by a European instrument called the Observation Monitor (ASIM).
Installed in 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 discharge of weather conditions that can only be seen in space . To understand these galactic weather conditions, it is crucial to understand 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 jets and elves? Blue jets, as their name suggests, are streams of blue lightning that do not go ashore, but rather shoot upwards into space. As the images show, it’s pretty nice to see.
Elves, on the other hand, are light emitters that occur as fast-expanding rings in the ionosphere.
Both elves and blue jets were spotted by ASIM on 26 February 2019 near Nauru, a small island in the central Pacific Ocean. They are now described in an article published in Earth on January 20, 2021. The study describes these events in fine detail to capture their awesome beauty, even without the use of images.
It is definitely worth reading if you love space phenomena. It is also a sign of all that we have yet to discover on our precious planet.
“This paper is an impressive highlight of the many new phenomena that ASIM observes above thunderstorms and shows that we still have so much to discover and learn about our universe,” said Astrid Orr, ESA’s Coordinator of Physical Sciences for Human and Robot Space. , said .