A rocket launched by Elon Musk’s SpaceX last week from California may have punched a hole in Earth’s ionosphere, a new analysis suggests.
The assessment said the Falcon 9 rocket, launched on July 19 from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California, likely punched a hole in the ionosphere, a layer around Earth consisting of the fourth state of matter, plasma, with a sea of electrically charged particles floating about 80-650 km (50-400 miles) above the surface.
Reviewing footage of the launch, space physicist Jeff Baumgardner of Boston University in the US said it was “quite possible” that the ionospheric “hole” was made by the launch.
“It’s a well-studied phenomenon where rockets burn their engines 200 to 300 km (about 120 to 190 miles) above the Earth’s surface,” he told Spaceweather.com.
Previous research has shown that with the increasing number of rocket launches around the world, such holes are becoming more common in the ionosphere, making radio communications on Earth possible.
The ionosphere is also dynamic and grows and shrinks depending on solar conditions. It is categorized into subregions called D, E, and F based on what wavelength of solar radiation a given layer absorbs.
Studies show that rockets and their afterburners can change the process by which charged particles form in this layer around Earth.
The motion of the rocket through the ionosphere has also been shown to generate large disturbances that travel faster than the speed of sound and generate shock waves in the layer.
As fast-moving rockets approach the boundaries of space, they tend to spew water and carbon dioxide into the exhaust, which can reduce the ionization process by more than two-thirds, research shows.
This is especially true for the F-layer of the ionosphere, which has the highest electron density among the subregions.
Holes “punched” in the ionosphere by rockets are identified by their characteristic red color, due to oxygen ions in this layer reacting with electrons from the rocket exhaust.
This releases light with the same wavelength as the red glow, experts said.
A previous SpaceX launch also caused a hole in the ionosphere.
SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket launched in August 2017 carrying Taiwan’s Formosat 5 satellite triggered “giant circular shock waves” in the ionosphere about five minutes after liftoff.
As the rocket carrying the single payload passed straight up through the ionosphere, it was found to have created a circular shock wave on the layer.
A study of the phenomenon, published in Space timefound that a giant hole was created in the ionosphere about 10 minutes after liftoff.
“The rocket exhaust plume subsequently created a large-scale ionospheric plasma hole (~900 km in diameter) with 10-70 percent TEC depletion compared to reference days,” the scientists wrote in the study.