A SpaceX rocket launched last August punched a hole in the Earth's ionosphere that lasted for three hours, causing global positioning systems to be off course by about a meter.
SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket, which was launched from California's Vandenberg Air Force Base Aug. 24 and carrying the Taiwan Forosat-5 satellite, flew vertically for most of its ascent into space because its payload was so light, Ars Technica reported.
Normally, space-bound rockets pitch over into a downrange direction shortly after liftoff to limit gravity’s drag and stress. That leaves rockets typically traveling almost parallel to the Earth’s surface at 62 to 80 miles altitude before releasing their payloads into space, Ars Technica said.
Because of its vertical trajectory, the Falcon 9 booster and its second stage created unusual circular shockwaves that helped prick a temporary 560-mile wide whole into the plasma of the ionosphere, Ars Technica said.
The American Geophysical Union blog noted that GPS signals must travel through the ionosphere to reach Earth's surface, and the speed at which they travel can change if the amount of plasma in the ionosphere fluctuates. Those changes can cause errors into GPS navigation signals.
"Consequently, the rocket launch generated a gigantic circular shock wave in the ionosphere covering a wide area four times greater than California," said a report from a study of the launch published in the Space Weather, a journal of the American Geophysical Union.
"It is followed by ionospheric hole (plasma depletions) due to rapid chemical reactions of rocket exhaust plumes and ionospheric plasma. The ionospheric hole causing large spatial gradients could lead to (one meter) range errors into GPS navigation and positioning system," the study's abstract said.
The study said understanding how such launches affect the upper atmosphere and space environment is important because of possibly similar launches in the future.
"We've seen many cases of a rocket-produced disturbance, but there's never been something that perfectly circular and with that large area," Charles Lin, a geophysicist at the National Cheng Kung University in Taiwan and lead author of the study, told the AGU blog.
Lin said even greater errors in GPS positions can happen if such a rocket blast happens during a team of high solar activity.
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