NASA shuttle probe studying mysterious atmosphere
The space shuttle Columbia broke up in a mysterious area of the upper atmosphere once so little understood and hard to study that scientists dubbed it the “ignorosphere”.
An amateur astronomer took a time exposure image showing purple light corkscrewing through the shuttle’s trail as it passed over California. It was unclear whether the flash was real, or a camera effect.
The shuttle was doing 12,000mph at an altitude of 39 miles when it disintegrated on February 1. All seven astronauts were killed.
Columbia was passing through the mesosphere, or middle atmosphere, which extends from about 30 to 50 miles above the surface. It is also called the ionosphere, because of the presence of free electrons – or ions.
“We are discovering the middle atmosphere has got a lot of electrical phenomena,” said Walt Lyons, president of FMA Research in Colorado. “The key message here is that there may be more things going on up there that we just do not understand or have no inkling of yet.”
Nasa researchers have “so far” concluded that the electromagnetic phenomena or ice crystals from the highest clouds are not known to pose a danger to shuttles on re-entry.
In addition, conditions on February 1 were not right for the most dangerous occurrences, though other experts caution that much remains unknown about this part of the atmosphere.
The region has been difficult to study, because it is too high for balloons and aircraft, yet it is too low and the air is too heavy for satellites, which would be unable to stay in orbit because of the drag, said Umran Inan, a physicist at Stanford University.
In the ionosphere, ultraviolet energy from the sun as well as cosmic rays from faraway stars separate electrons from atomic nuclei. The free electrons give the area a characteristic not unlike metal, in that it can reflect electromagnetic energy.
These electrons also create strange electrical effects, with fanciful names like “elves,” “sprites” and “blue jets”.
Until recently, they were largely dismissed as illusions, noticed only by bleary-eyed airline pilots.
All those phenomena are related to thunderstorms, which were not recorded in the area at the time of Columbia’s descent.
But the scientists are just starting to understand phenomena in the upper atmosphere.
“The research we have been able to do has made us realise it’s even weirder than we thought,” Lyons said.
“There may be other things that happen up there that we just don’t know about. Maybe we just encountered a new phenomenon the hard way.”
