NI LabVIEW and DAQ Used to Measure Nature's Fireworks

[jboone]

An English university has used NI technology to build a system to monitor  natural particle accelerators in the atmosphere.

Martin Füllekrug and his team from the University of Bath have implemented a  system in the UK’s Exmoor National Park and other remote locations across Europe  to collect data about transient airglows commonly referred to as “sprites.”  Sprites are what Scottish physicist and Nobel Prize winner Charles Thomson Rees  Wilson predicted 85 years ago – an electrical breakdown of Earth’s atmosphere  occurring above thunderstorms.

There are many images of the firework-like phenomenon, but further study has  been limited because sprites are uncommon and fleeting. In particular,  scientists have suggested, but thus far have failed to prove, that sprites act  as giant particle accelerators 40 km above Earth’s surface. Using NI data  acquisition hardware and LabVIEW, Füllekrug has developed a high-precision,  low-power portable system that rapidly and continuously records the natural  environment from certain key points. If the system detects a novel event, the  scientists are able to access and analyze historical data before and after the  data takes place.

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