Elon Musk’s Starship rocket explosion destroyed upper atmosphere, study finds

In 2023, the gigantic explosions that caused the destruction of the mega rocket Spacecraft SpaceX property of the tycoon Elon Musk also caused which opened one of the largest “holes” ever detected in the ionosphere which is the atmospheric layer that acts as a protective shield for life on Earth.

The opening managed to extend over thousands of kilometers and lasted for nearly an hour, according to a recent study published Aug. 26 in the journal Geophysical Research Letters . This is the first time that This type of disturbance in this layer of the atmosphere was generated by a man-made explosion. say the researchers.

Yuri Yasyukevich atmospheric physicist at the Institute of Solar-Terrestrial Physics in Irkutsk (Russia) and co-author of the study, detailed in the magazine Nature that the magnitude of the event caused a great surprise to his entire team.

From your point of view, “This means that we do not understand the processes that take place in the atmosphere” and phenomena like these could mean that autonomous vehicles will need precision satellite navigation in the future.

November 18, 2023 was a day of great anticipation for SpaceX. Spacecraft the largest and most powerful rocket ever built in the world, was planned to carry out its second test flight from the space base located in Boca Chica, Texas (USA).

Nearly two minutes after liftoff, Starship’s stage separation appeared to be going smoothly. The Super Heavy booster shut down most of its engines, and the main ship fired its own engines so it could separate and drift away. Shortly after this process began, the Super Heavy exploded in a large ball of flame and humor over the Gulf of Mexico, at an altitude of 90 kilometers.

The spaceship in the meantime, He was able to continue his journey for another four minutes. until It also exploded.

From SpaceX, their goal was to send the spacecraft at speeds similar to orbital speeds, at 28,000 kilometers per hour. Finally The spacecraft managed to climb to an altitude of almost 150 kilometers above the Earth’s surface which means he has reached the edge of space.

“What we believe is that The second stage’s automated flight termination system appears to have activated very late in the start-up as the ship was heading toward the Gulf of Mexico,” he argued. John Insprucker SpaceX’s chief integration engineer, during a live stream.

Following the events Starship experienced during this test flight, Yasyukevich and his team wanted to find out how massive explosions can affect the ionosphere. .

This is a region of the atmosphere that extends from 50 to 1,000 kilometers above sea level and is ionized by the Sun’s radiation. As a result, atoms and molecules can lose or gain electrons and, therefore, a large part of their mass. The ionosphere corresponds to positively charged electrons and ions, while the majority of molecules remain neutral.

According to Yasyukevich, scientists can measure the degree of ionization in real time by comparing the speeds of radio waves of two different frequencies. With this data, it is possible to know the impact that different natural events such as earthquakes, or man-made phenomena, such as underground nuclear tests, can have on the ionosphere.

With this in mind, the team, which includes researchers from the Institute of Solar-Terrestrial Physics and the Institute of Globe Physics in Paris, France, studied data from nearly 2,500 ground stations in North America and the Caribbean that receive satellite navigation signals.

The analysis allowed them to discover that the explosions suffered by the Starship in November last year caused shock waves that would have propagated faster than the speed of sound.

This caused the ionosphere to transform, for almost an hour, into a region of neutral atmosphere, like a “hole”. The event affected an area extending from the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico to the southeastern United States.

As Yasyukevich explains, rocket exhaust gases could cause chemical reactions that would then produce temporary holes in this layer of the atmosphere, even if no explosion occurred. But according to the researcher, during the Starship test flight, the shock waves alone triggered a more significant effect.

Yasyukevich also stressed that this was the first case of detection of an ionospheric hole formed by an artificial explosion.

“These types of catastrophic events, like the spacecraft explosion, are interesting precisely because you can see effects that the team is not able to detect in smaller events,” he explained.

Then, he added that “by analyzing the data and understanding their nature, we can better understand the structure of the ionosphere and the phenomena that exist there: how charged particles interact with neutrals and how the atypical waves that we observe are formed. All this together contributes to a very important task: understanding the structure of near-Earth space and using it as a natural detector of processes in various geospheres. “.

Kosuke Heki, a geophysicist at Hokkaido University in Japan who was one of the reviewers of the article, told the science magazine that “this case study” had come as a great surprise to him.

According to the researcher, this hole was not as big as the one that appeared after the eruption of a volcano in Tonga in January 2022. However, its size is larger than that caused by the meteorite that fell near the city of Chelyabinsk, Russia, in February 2013.