Apart from certain issues with their space toilet, the crew of four NASA astronauts’ journey around the Moon and back earlier this year was a resounding success.
The mission officially broke the record for the farthest any human has ever traveled from Earth, gave crew members astonishing views of the far side of the Moon — and, of course, set the stage for NASA’s first attempt to land astronauts on the lunar surface in over half a century.
Now, according to a new study published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, it turns out that the April rocket launch also managed to tear a massive hole in the Earth’s upper atmosphere, as Space.com reports — a major disruption in the ionosphere that was powerful enough to throw off GPS signals.
By analyzing data from ground-based GPS receivers, a team of researchers from the National Cheng Kung University in Taiwan reconstructed how NASA’s Space Launch System rocket changed the concentrations of free electrons in the Earth’s atmosphere.
“The total electron content observations during the Artemis-II Lunar mission revealed rare reoccurring ionospheric perturbations at three different occasions,” the team noted in its paper. The launch “triggered shock waves and unprecedented large-scale disturbances” across North America.
Coauthor and National Cheng Kung University earth science professor Charles Lin told Space.com that the resulting positioning errors could have had serious repercussions back on the ground.
“A positioning error of a couple of meters is enough to cause an autonomous car to change lanes,” he said. “It could have a strong impact not only on self-driving cars but also on drone positioning.”
Other disturbances, such as powerful solar storms, can similarly wreak havoc on GPS and other positioning systems. For instance, in November of last year, a major surge in solar activity released enough charged particles to cause “significant positioning errors” of over 33 feet, “large enough to disrupt precision agriculture and autonomous transportation industries” in the US, a paper at the time concluded.
NASA’s SLS, one of the most powerful rockets ever built, conducted three maneuvers — an initial launch, an apogee boost burn, and a trans-lunar injection — that were localized “over the same region,” causing major “ionospheric perturbations,” the authors of the latest paper found, mimicking the effects of a major solar storm, albeit on a much shorter time frame.
“These findings establish orbital maneuver burns performed within the ionosphere as a distinct and repeatable source of anthropogenic space weather, beyond the well-established launch-stage disturbances,” the researchers wrote.
Ahead of future launches, they suggest studying the effects of these perturbances on the health of the ionosphere as a whole, as well as their effects on global navigation systems and high-frequency communications.
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