SpaceX blew a 'catastrophic' first-of-its-kind hole in the atmosphere with Starship

A new study published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters details a hole that was created in Earth's atmosphere following the Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly (RUD) of SpaceX's Starship rocket during it second orbital test flight.

Credit: Space.com

The study was published in the scientific journal on August 26, and claims SpaceX created a hole in Earth's ionosphere, which is located between 50 and 400 miles above Earth's surface. This region of Earth's atmosphere is where gasses are stripped of electrons and turned into plasma, but following the explosion of SpaceX's Starship rocket researchers detected a first-of-its-kind disturbance.

According to the study multiple ground-based instruments and satellites detected the disturbance in the region of the atmosphere where the rocket exploded, with it lasting for anywhere between 30 to 40 minutes before fully recovering. The team explained the ionospheric holes aren't particularly new with chemical rockets exploding, as researchers know that carbon dioxide and water vapor can result in ionized oxygen atoms reforming into normal oxygen atom. The region this occurs in causes a "hole" to form in the plasma sea that is the ionosphere.

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What is new here is the method of which the hole was formed. Instead of a chemical reaction the ionospheric hole was created by the shock wave of Starship exploding, which researchers say temporarily removed the normal properties of the plasma within that region of space. Additionally, the researchers say its possible any fuel that didn't immediately burn-up post explosion may have extended the duration of the ionospheric hole. The researchers say this is the first time a ionospheric hole was created by a "catastrophic phenomena" human-made explosion.

"Analyzing the data and understanding their nature, we understand more deeply the structure of the ionosphere, [and] the nature of the phenomena that occur in it," said study lead author Yury Yasyukevich, an ionosphere physicist at the Russian Academy of Sciences' Institute of Solar-Terrestrial Physics (ISTP) to TASS