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Comment on Triggering Lightning with a Rocket by Aknup
['Aaron Beckendorf', 'Ferdinand Douxelles']
Comments for Hackaday
One reason is the difficulty of predicting when and where lightning will strike; tall structures do attract more lightning strikes, but it’s hard to move them into a storm’s path.
Instead, researchers often use small rockets carrying a fine wire to trigger strikes, an approach [Electron Impressions] recently replicated (more details).
The wire trailed by a rocket creates an artificial leader, ideally triggering a controlled strike.
To consistently get a strike, the rocket needs to be launched under a strongly-negatively-charged region of the cloud.
For a more reusable solution, some researchers have also experimented with using drones to trigger lightning.