 Old sayings aside, lightning sometimes does strike twice, but perhaps not always in the same place. Can one lightning bolt somehow trigger a second or so-called sympathetic strike many miles away? Watch closely. This is lightning as seen from the space shuttle. These flashes are very interesting because they show a possible relationship between very large flashes separated by large distances. Hopefully the shuttle data will help us to understand this phenomenon. And that's just one of the objectives of lightning research being conducted by scientists here at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. And some new answers will likely come from an ongoing series of space shuttle-based lightning experiments. The shuttle's television cameras will be used to simulate what future lightning sensors will see. A global weather computer called Mekitis will alert the crew to what storms lie ahead so that additional pictures can be taken. Ultimately NASA hopes to use this information to design lightning-sensing instruments to be placed on future satellites and on the space station freedom. If we put lightning sensors into geostationary orbit, into low-worth orbit, we'll be able to get a global mapping of lightning activity. Improving our understanding of the basic physics of storms and developing new ways to observe them will lead to better forecasting abilities, making us all safer from this deadly force of nature. Perhaps we're just beginning to understand what this research may lead to. As an example, we've uncovered some relationship between lightning activity, the flash rate of lightning, and the precipitation grain volume of the cloud. If we can establish this relationship and quantify it further, we would be able to then use lightning observations from space to determine what the rainfall rate from a particular storm system is. Using the vantage point of space to better understand the many environmental systems in our world and how they interact is the goal of NASA's initiative for the 1990s known as Mission to Planet Earth. For now, ongoing lightning studies will provide researchers with an important head start. In Huntsville, this is Mike Errington reporting.