SpaceX launched a test rocket last November. tried to explode twice in the air. Such an event doesn’t happen every day, so it gave geophysicists the opportunity to see exactly what kind of trauma it was. do to the Earth’s atmosphere. The verdict? Not good!
SpaceX’s Starship test launch on November 18, 2023, detonated two separate rockets as it rose above Earth’s surface. Those two massive explosions allowed scientists from Russia’s Irkutsk Institute of Solar-Terrestrial Physics to take measurements from the ionosphere that are normally undetectable, giving them new insight into how we’re affecting the world around us. Scientists spoke to TASS, a Russian state news agency.:
According to the leading researcher at the Institute of Solar and Terrestrial Physics of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Doctor of Physical and Mathematical Sciences Yuri Yasyukevich, the rocket launch and explosion caused an unexpected reaction in the ionosphere.
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According to the scientist, this is the first case of a non-chemical plasma hole formed by a man-made explosion. “Such cataclysmic phenomena, such as the explosion of Starship, are interesting precisely because you can see effects that instruments cannot detect in weaker events. Analyzing the data and understanding their nature, we gain a deeper understanding of the structure of the ionosphere, the nature of the phenomena occurring in it: how charged particles interact with neutral particles, how the atypical waves that we observe are formed. All this together works for a very important task – to understand the structure of near-Earth space and use it as a natural detector of processes in different layers of the geosphere,” the scientist explained.
The article published by scientists called the pair of explosions “Anthropogenic Non-Chemical Depletion,” referring to the amount of electrons detected in the ionosphere. The depletion, or hole in the ionosphere created by the explosions, spread across lower North America — although, according to Popular Mechanics, The exact size of the hole has not yet been determined.
Rockets penetrate the ionosphere all the time, but it’s rare for a rocket to explode there — and even rarer for it to explode at all. twice from a launch. Hopefully, with the information gleaned from SpaceX’s failure, scientists can better understand how the ionosphere responds to human activity. And, perhaps, someone can once again build a real working spaceship.
