Like a Bolt from Above
Lightning scientists begin to solve electric mysteries
SOCORRO, N.M. — Ten thousand feet high in the New Mexico mountains, Jake Trueblood is getting ready to fire rockets into a thunderstorm.
He lines up eight rockets, straight as soldiers, then connects each to a wire bobbin once used to guide missiles for the French military. Trueblood arms the rockets and heads underground, then waits for hours in a windowless chamber on whose metal roof the rockets sit.
Trueblood, a graduate student at the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology in Socorro, is waiting for a good strong electric field in the atmosphere. Then he’ll push a button that will send a whoosh of compressed air to a single rocket, sending it careening more than a thousand feet high. The goal is for the rapidly moving wire to trick the air into discharging its electricity in a lightning flash that will slam to the ground just above Trueblood’s head.