SpaceX Punched a Gap within the Ionosphere
July 20, 2023: On the night of July nineteenth, SpaceX launched a Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg Area Drive Base in California. Sky watchers from southern California to Arizona witnessed a magnificent exhaust plume. On the San Francisco Volcanic Area north of Flagstaff, photographer Jeremy Perez noticed one thing further:
“After the rocket handed overhead, a crimson fluorescent glow expanded southward and crossed over the Milky Means,” says Perez. “It was seen for nearly 20 minutes.”
The crimson glow is an indication that the rocket punched a gap within the ionosphere–one thing SpaceX and others have been doing for years. One well-known instance occured on August 25, 2017, when a Falcon 9 rocket carrying Taiwan’s FORMOSAT-5 satellite tv for pc created a hole 4 occasions greater than the state of California. On June 19, 2022, one other Falcon 9 punched a hole over the east coast of the USA, sparking a show of crimson lights from New York to the Carolinas that many observers mistook for aurora borealis.
“This can be a well studied phenomenon when rockets are burning their engines 200 to 300 km above Earth’s floor,” explains area physicist Jeff Baumgardner of Boston College. “The crimson glow seems when exhaust gasses from the rocket’s 2nd stage trigger the ionosphere to recombine rapidly.”
Rocket engines spray water (H2O) and carbon dioxide (CO2) into the ionosphere, quenching native ionization by as a lot as 70%. An advanced collection of cost change reactions between oxygen ions (O+) and molecules from the rocket exhaust produce photons at a wavelength of 6300 Å–the identical colour as crimson auroras.
This film from David Blanchard exterior Flagstaff reveals how the crimson glow developed because the silvery rocket exhaust pale into the ionosphere:
“I watched the present from Higher Lake Mary within the Coconino Nationwide Forest,” says Blanchard. “The exhaust plume was spectacular.”
Baumgardner reviewed SpaceX’s video footage from the July nineteenth launch. “It reveals the second stage engine burning at 286 km close to the ionosphere’s F-region peak for that point of day. So, it’s fairly attainable that an ionospheric ‘gap’ was made,” he says.
As soon as uncommon, ionospheric “punch holes” are more and more frequent with record numbers of rocket launches led by SpaceX sending Starlink satellites to low-Earth orbit. Ham radio operators could discover them when shortwave alerts fail to skip over the horizon, capturing via holes as a substitute of bouncing again to Earth. Sudden GPS errors may also end result from the anomalies. These results could also be troublesome, however they’re shortlived; re-ionization happens as quickly because the solar comes up once more.
Readers, did you see a crimson glow from this week’s SpaceX launch? Submit your photos here.
extra photos: from Cheryl Hanscom Wilcox of Mammoth Lakes, CA; from MaryBeth Kiczenski within the San Juan Mountains of Colorado; from Richard Rast of Mountainair, New Mexico;