On November 18, 2023, SpaceX's Starship, the largest and most powerful rocket ever built, lifted off from a test base on Boca Chica Beach in Texas. There were two explosions during the flight. After the moment of separation, the booster exploded at an altitude of about 90 km above Earth. The cause was an engine failure. The upper stage of the rocket reached an altitude of about 150 kilometers. A safety system then forced it to self-destruct. We wrote more on this topic in the article: “SpaceX Rocket Explodes in Space, Booster 'Emerges into Fireball'“.
The Starship explosion caused a hole in the ionosphere. It stretched for thousands of kilometers
The results of the research by Russian scientists, which were published in the scientific journal on August 26 Geophysical Research Lettersindicate that the rocket explosion caused the ionosphere to rupture – a layer of the atmosphere located at an altitude of about 50 km to 1,000 km above sea level. This caused the formation of a “hole” that stretched for almost an hour over an area of thousands of kilometers – from the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico to the southeastern United States – indicates the portal Nature.
The effects of the explosion were greater than those caused by the Chelyabinsk meteor.
For the purposes of the study, the team of scientists analyzed data from over 2.5 thousand American and Caribbean ground stations receiving satellite signals. The hole caused by the Starship explosion was one of the largest detected in the ionosphere. Even larger than the one caused by the Chelyabinsk meteor in 2013 – noted Kosuke Heki, a geophysicist from the Japanese Hokkaido University in an interview with the portal.
It is also the first known case of a human-induced explosion causing a non-chemical hole in the ionosphere. The results were a surprise to the researchers themselves. “Usually, such holes are created as a result of chemical processes occurring in the ionosphere as a result of interactions with engine fuel,” he explained. TASS Yuri Yasyukevich, an atmospheric physicist from the Institute of Physics of the Sun and Earth in Irkutsk. – This means that we do not fully understand the processes that occur in the atmosphere – he added.