We launched a rocket into the clouds and it triggered lightning to strike. Visit our lightning research website at gpl.fit.edu.
The instruments behind Dr. Joe Dwyer and Dr. Hamid Rassoul first discovered X-rays from lighting. Two really happy, and world famous, scientists!
This simple-looking equipment, designed by former Florida Tech faculty member Dr. Joe Dwyer, was the first to discover that X-rays lived inside lightning.
This is the roof of the F. W. Olin Physical Science building. Dr. Rassoul is helping students install lightning measuring equipment.
When Discovery Channel wanted to make a TV program about lightning, they came to Florida Tech for help. If you’re interested, check out another program created by PBS Nova Video that aired in 2005.
Although we are able trigger lightning, making it easier for us to study it, once in awhile we go “lighting chasing” to experience it in nature.
Sometimes, we get in a plane and go up to meet lightning where it initiates. Up close and personal.
That little jet has to carry a lucky student, and lots of instruments so that we can measure the electric field, X-rays, radio pulses, gamma rays, magnetic field, and lots more. Whew!
Before we go into the field, we first rehearse all tests in the lab.
Dr. Ningyu Liu and a student go over last-minute details.
More triggered lightning from our tower. It looks like a painting.
More triggered lightning from our tower. It looks like a painting.
Strong winds make a beautiful scene.
We shoot a rocket, tethered to a wire, into the sky triggering lightning from the ground! What you’re seeing is the lightning along the wire with the wind blowing the sparks.
See our two-ton pinhole X-ray camera in the lower left.
Our lighting-testing tower is located here in Florida on the Camp Blanding Military base, close to the city of Starke. It looks very innocent in the daylight. At night it dances with lightning.
This rocket launcher allows us to launch rockets tethered by wires to the tower.
This is control central for all lightning tower operations.
It’s amazing how beautiful, and dangerous, this natural phenomenon can be. It takes your breath away.
After the discovery of X-rays in lightning by a Florida Tech team, a new question was raised: Are X-rays produced only in lightning or can they be produced with any large-enough spark? We took our instruments to the Boston Museum of Science to use their large-spark Van de Graaff Generators and see if we could get X-rays.
Boston Museum of Science is the home of the world’s largest air-insulated Van de Graaff spark generator. We went there to do this amazing experiment, utilizing one of our X-ray detectors boxes from our Thunderstorm Energetic Radiation Array (TERA) instruments.
It’s not all hard work. Sometimes you just have to have some fun.
What’s a muon? It’s one of the elementary particles produced from the interaction of cosmic rays with the atmosphere.
Students helping to install the detectors on the lightning site.
The camera is poised to take pictures of lightning using X-ray vision.
Did you know Florida is a lightning capital of the world? When it comes to the latest in lightning research, national media like the Discovery Channel look to Florida Tech. Lightning researchers here first discovered X-rays from lightning. Heard of tornado chasers? Florida Tech has lightning chasers. Lightning chasers run down lightning by jeep and find it in nature—snap! zap! It blackens a tree. They hop in a plane and chase it in the clouds, checking it out on instruments. They make it in the lab. Florida Tech collaborates with University of Florida researchers to study how it originates—lightning chasers observe lightning and create it at researchers’ control central—Camp Blanding. A lightning tower there looks innocent in daylight but dances with megavolts at night. The fearless Ph.D. lightning cowboys launch rockets and trigger lightning. Triggered lightning and strong winds—an awesome combination! And they live to write about it, presenting and publishing papers so the world can learn more about lightning, too.
