Elon Musk’s Space X’s Falcon 9 rocket launched from the Vandenberg Space Force Base in California on July 19, resulting in a hole in the ionosphere. The rocket created a hole with its exhaust gases. The Falcon 9 rocket, propelled at excessive speed into space, left a pale red glow in the sky over Flagstaff, Arizona, showing that it had created an ionospheric hole.
According to the Space X website, it is a reusable, two-stage rocket for the dedicated and secure transport of humans and payloads into Earth’s orbit and beyond. SpaceX also stated that it’s by far the world’s first orbital-class reusable rocket. Falcon 9 has so far carried out 240 launches and 198 landings.
The ionosphere is the uppermost segment of Earth’s atmosphere where it meets space and where aurora lights are formed. It is located 50 to 400 miles above the Earth’s surface. It plays a crucial role in creating auroras during geomagnetic storms, as solar plasma reacts with ions to produce spectacular colours in the sky.
Photographer Jeremy Perez captured the red afterglow of the pierced ionosphere along with the Milky Way galaxy.
“After the rocket passed overhead, a red fluorescent glow expanded southward and crossed over the Milky Way,” Perez tells SpaceWeather.com “It was visible for almost 20 minutes.”
“This is a well-studied phenomenon when rockets are burning their engines 120 to 190 miles (200 to 300 kilometres) above Earth’s surface,” space physicist Jeff Baumgardner of Boston University tells SpaceWeather.com.
“ The red glow appears when exhaust gases from the rocket’s second stage cause the ionosphere to recombine quickly.”
This phenomenon also took place earlier, after Falcon 9 launches, notably in 2017. Ars Technica reported in 2018 that the trajectory of the rocket additionally contributed to the impact on the ionosphere, developing a 560-mile-wide hole that lasted up to three hours because of the added impact of shockwaves due to the rocket going vertically, rather than moving parallel to the Earth’s surface.
“Without considering the rocket launch effects, there are errors from ionosphere, troposphere and other factors that will produce up to 20-meter [65-foot] errors or more,” Charles C.H. Lin of the National Cheng Kung University in Taiwan, told Ars Technica in 2018.
The hole within the ionosphere additionally had a few effects on GPS systems, altering location accuracy by a few feet. However, this is not much of importance now.
“Humans are entering an era that rocket launches are becoming usual and frequent due to reduced cost by reusable rockets,” Lin said. “Meanwhile, humans are developing more powerful rockets to send cargoes to other planets. These two factors will gradually affect the middle and upper atmosphere more, and that is worthwhile to pay some attention to, reported newsweek.com
