2024-09-04 09:58:31
The “Starship” explosion in November 2023 ripped a huge hole in the atmosphere. Such events could disrupt important satellite signals.
The explosion during the second test flight of the giant rocket “Starship” last November blasted a hole thousands of kilometers wide in the ionosphere, a study found. The ionosphere is a layer of the Earth’s atmosphere that extends about 60 to 1,000 kilometers above sea level.
Yury Yasyukevich, a researcher at the Institute of Solar-Terrestrial Physics in Irkutsk, Russia, and co-author of the study, said the scale of the event surprised his team. “This means that we do not understand the processes taking place in the atmosphere,” Yasyukevich said.
He and his team examined data from more than 2,500 ground stations in North America and the Caribbean. They found that the explosion of the SpaceX rocket generated shock waves that were faster than the speed of sound and transformed the positively and negatively charged particles into neutral molecules. This state lasted for almost an hour, the study found.
Yasyukevich told the journal Nature that such events could also have an impact on future autonomous vehicles that require precise satellite navigation.
This is because the ratio of particles in the ionosphere affects the speed of the radio waves emitted by navigation satellites. In case of doubt, this could disrupt the signals used to navigate autonomous vehicles.
Other past events have also had a major impact on the particles in the ionosphere. The largest hole in the atmospheric layer that has been detected so far was caused by the meteorite that hit near Chelyabinsk in Russia in 2013, it is said. The eruption of a Tonga volcano in early 2022 also tore a huge hole in the ionosphere.
The “Starship” spacecraft launched by Elon Musk’s company SpaceX took off on November 18. Shortly after launch, the lower rocket stage was supposed to separate and later land in the Gulf of Mexico. At an altitude of 70 kilometers and a speed of 5,500 km/h, the separation was initially successful, but shortly afterwards the booster exploded at an altitude of about 90 kilometers.
The upper rocket stage, the actual spaceship, continued to fly for a while. After eight minutes, the ground station lost contact. It was said that the self-destruct mechanism was triggered, causing “Starship” to explode.