evidence by sound

[With the sensors in Boulder, Colorado, and the possible lightening
strike occuring over California, this means the sound would have arrived
in Boulder well over an hour after the event, right? Amazing
sensitivity!]

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2003/02/07/MN200326.DTL&type=printable

Federal scientists are looking for evidence that a bolt of electricity
in the upper atmosphere might have doomed the space shuttle Columbia as
it streaked over California, The Chronicle has learned.

Investigators are combing records from a network of ultra-sensitive
instruments that might have detected a faint thunderclap in the upper
atmosphere at the same time a photograph taken by a San Francisco
astronomer appears to show a purplish bolt of lightning striking the
shuttle.

[...]

"We're working hard on the data set. We have an obligation," said Alfred
Bedard, a scientist at the federal Environmental Technology Laboratory
in Boulder, Colo. He said the lab was providing the data to NASA but
that it was too early to draw any conclusions from the sounds of the
shuttle re-entry.

The lab has been listening to the sounds of ghostly electromagnetic
phenomena in the upper atmosphere, dubbed sprites, blue jets and elves.
For some time, scientists have speculated on whether these events could
endanger airliners or returning spacecraft.

[...]

The little-known infrasound project at the Environmental Technology
Laboratory operates a network of sophisticated electronic ears that can
pick up subaudible thuds of waves crashing on either coast of the United
States and the hiss of meteors and spacecraft re-entering the atmosphere
thousands of miles away.

Sound waves of this nature are called "infrasonic" and are below the
range of human hearing but travel unimpeded for extraordinary distances.
Arrays of infrasonic sensors in the high Colorado plains east of Boulder
recently have been looking for the crackle of the ghostly
electromagnetic events in the Earth's upper atmosphere.

"We basically detect events at very long ranges," Bedard said. But he
stressed that it was too early to draw any conclusions from sounds of
the shuttle re-entry. Bedard said the acoustic sensors had previously
detected the re-entry of a space shuttle from Northwest Canada to the
Kennedy Space Center.

CELESTIAL THUNDERCLAP

Originally, it was thought that the electrical charges in the thin
atmosphere 50 miles above Earth were too dispersed to create infrasound.
But Los Alamos National Laboratories physicist Mark Stanley said that,
on closer inspection, "we've seen very strong ionization in sprites"
indicating that there were enough air molecules ionized to cause heating
and an accompanying pulse -- a celestial thunderclap, as it were.

-- -Kraig Grady
North American Embassy of Anaphoria Island
http://www.anaphoria.com
The Wandering Medicine Show
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