Huge SpaceX rocket explosion shredded the upper atmosphere
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The huge explosions that destroyed SpaceX’s Starship mega-rocket last year also blew one of the biggest ‘holes’ ever detected in the ionosphere, a layer of thin air in the upper atmosphere. The hole stretched for thousands of kilometres and persisted for nearly an hour, a study found1.
Study co-author Yury Yasyukevich, an atmospheric physicist at the Institute of Solar‐Terrestrial Physics in Irkutsk, Russia, says that the extent of the disturbance took his team by surprise: “It means we don’t understand processes which take place in the atmosphere.” He adds that such phenomena could have implications for future autonomous vehicles that might require precision satellite navigation. The results were published on 26 August in Geophysical Research Letters.
On 18 November last year, SpaceX launched its Starship rocket — the biggest and most powerful rocket ever built — from a launchpad in Boca Chica, Texas. Starship’s first stage is designed to return safely to the surface for reuse but blew up shortly after separating from the upper stage, roughly 90 kilometres above the Gulf of Mexico. Minutes later, the self-destruction mechanism on the upper stage fired, triggering a second explosion at an altitude of around 150 kilometres.
