NASA astronaut captures rare lightning that actually shoots toward space

As the International Space Station whizzed over Mexico and the United States — before floodwaters catastrophically rose in Central Texas — a NASA astronaut watched the storms from miles above. 

Nichole Ayers set up her camera to record a time-lapse movie in the orbiting laboratory’s cupola on Thursday. Her goal was to photograph exotic weather phenomena from an alien’s-eye view. 

With planning and patience, she snagged a masterful shot of a gigantic jet, a rare type of lightning that shoots up from the top of a thunderstorm into the edge of space. 

You read that right: There are indeed reverse lightning bolts that actually shoot toward the heavens rather than down to Earth’s surface. These are just one kind of “transient luminous event,” of which scientists know little. In fact, they’re so unusual that Ayers initially misidentified the jet as another type of TLE called a sprite, which occurs in the upper atmosphere above thunderstorms. 

“Just. Wow,” she wrote in a July 3 post on X. “We have a great view above the clouds, so scientists can use these types of pictures to better understand the formation, characteristics, and relationship of TLEs to thunderstorms.” 

These so-called TLEs take many forms. They can disrupt communication systems and create flight risks for planes and spacecraft. Scientists want to better understand them to improve weather predictions. 

But because they happen much higher than normal lightning and storm clouds, they’re hard to study. The European Space Agency has installed a monitor on the outside of the space station, which flies about 250 miles above Earth, to collect data on these events. The information is helping researchers unspool the mystery of all the ways thunderstorms can affect Earth’s atmosphere.

“The region of space above the thunderstorms is almost like an electrical zoo,” said Burcu Kosar, a space physicist, in a NASA video. “We have this collection of electrical activity. We have blue jets, gigantic jets, trolls, halos. It’s almost like an electric fairy tale.” 

Kosar has spearheaded a new citizen science project that combines scientific data with the photography of storm chasers who have a knack for capturing TLEs. Called Spritacular, it’s the first crowdsourced database of these phenomena that is readily accessible to researchers.

What scientists do know about gigantic jets — and, yes, “gigantic” is part of their name, not an extra descriptor thrown in by this reporter — is that they seem to start like regular lightning inside a storm. Most of them have been spotted coming from tall, powerful storms over warm oceans. These storms often have a protruding top, where part of the cloud reaches higher than the atmosphere.

The gigantic jets may form when a strong and brief burst of rising air, called a convective pulse, happens inside the storm. The burst stirs things up near the top of the cloud, intensifying the storm. It also creates a layer of electric charge at the top.

Scientists think when the electric charges are stacked inside the cloud in a certain pattern, they allow lightning to break free from the top of the cloud. The gigantic jets emerge as bright tree or carrot shapes of plasma, looking a little like something out of H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds.

Don Pettit, a NASA astronaut and photographer who recently returned to the planet from the space station, praised Ayers for her shot. 

“To record a photo like this takes skill to set up the camera,” he wrote on X, “but more than that, the knowledge of what lightning systems are likely to create [TLEs] and the willingness to take 2000-5000 images where only one will record” the event.