A while back I heard a wild theory that the shuttle Columbia was brought down because of high-altitude megalightning, or sprites. And there was a documentary about this lightning phenomoenon that I found rather fascinating. (These tentacled sprites can extend for 50 miles above the Earth!)
Then today, from New Scientist, appears an amazing slow motion video of a lightning sprite in action (RealPlayer version here)
In summer 2005, researchers from Duke University, US, and collaborators from FMA Research in Fort Collins, Colorado, US, kept a watchful eye on the skies above the Great Plains from the Yucca Ridge Field Station in Fort Collins, hoping to capture sprites in action using their 7000-frames-per-second camera. And capture it they did
I think that when a body gets friction in air it is charging but when it get friction into the space it is discharge for what ever when it get in the atmosfer. This is proven with meteors. May a stupid way of my thinking.
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I am the NASA Researcher and the Principal Investigator for the Mesoscale Lightning Experiment that was designed to study lightning from space, using the on-board B & W TV TV cameras of the Space Shuttle. I am the researcher that began the Thunderstorm Overflight to study lightning using the NASA U-2 U-2 aircraft in the late 70's to record both video, photographs, and elecrtonic signatures of lightning. One of the U-2 pilots told me of seeing that he had ightning moving toward the Stratosphere and with that observation that I became very interested in this unusal lighting