Global Courant
When lightning strikes continents like Europe and Africa, there will be a new satellite instrument to record it all.
The European Space Agency (ESA) and the European Organization for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites (Eumetsat) have released the first images captured by the Lightning Imager, a recently launched satellite instrument capable of taking up to 1,000 images of lightning per second.
This instrument, nicknamed “the lightning fighter”, has managed to capture the natural phenomenon in new animations released on Monday. According to the ESA, the animation shows a series of images captured over a period of one minute by the instrument’s four cameras.
The Lightning Imager has the ability to detect fast flashes of light in the Earth’s atmosphere at a distance of 36,000 kilometers, both during the day and at night. Since the instrument was successfully launched aboard the Meteosat Third Generation satellite on December 13, 2022, ESA engineers say it will “revolutionize severe storm detection and forecasting”.
The device is capable of capturing a lightning strike faster than the blink of an eye, Guia Pastorini, Leonardo’s project engineering manager, said in a statement. press release.
“Thanks to specific algorithms, on-board data is processed to send only useful information to Earth, which supports the development of more accurate weather forecasts and contributes to the study of weather phenomena and air transport safety,” she said.
Watch the video above to see the first images from the Lightning Imager.
