Astronaut Andreas Mogensen from the European House Company (ESA) lately documented uncommon thunder phenomena as a part of the Thor-Davis experiment throughout his Huginn mission on the Worldwide House Station.
Amongst his exceptional captures was a pink sprite, a kind of Transient Luminous Occasion (TLE), occurring above thunderclouds at an altitude starting from 40 to 80 kilometers. Scientists estimate the pink sprite’s dimensions to be roughly 14 by 26 kilometers.
In a earlier occasion in 2015, Mogensen additionally efficiently recorded kilometer-wide blue flashes at an altitude of round 18 kilometers, together with a pulsating blue jet reaching as much as 40 kilometers.
This atmospheric phenomenon stays poorly understood, constituting a mysterious facet of our ambiance. Electrical storms extending into the stratosphere not solely contribute to the fascination of those occasions but additionally bear implications for our understanding of how the ambiance shields us from radiation.