Elon Musk’s SpaceX rocket tests blow holes in the atmosphere

SpaceX launched a test rocket last November managed to explode twice in the air. This type of event doesn’t happen every day, so it gave geophysicists a chance to see exactly what type of trauma do what to the Earth’s atmosphere. The verdict? Not great!

The test launch of the SpaceX spacecraft on November 18, 2023, detonated two separate parts of the rocket as it ascended from the Earth’s surface. These two massive explosions allowed scientists at Russia’s Institute of Solar-Terrestrial Physics in Irkutsk to get readings from the ionosphere that would not normally be detectable, giving them new insight into how we affect the world around us . Scientists spoke to TASS, a Russian state news service:

According to senior researcher at the Institute of Solar and Terrestrial Physics of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Doctor of Physical and Mathematical Sciences Yuri Yasyukevich, the rocket launch and explosion caused an unexpected response in the ionosphere.

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According to the scientist, this is the first case of detection of a non-chemical plasma hole formed as a result of a man-made explosion. “Such catastrophic phenomena, such as the explosion of the Ship, are interesting precisely because one can observe effects that the equipment is not able to detect in weaker events. Analyzing the data and understanding their nature, we understand more deeply the structure of the ionosphere, the nature of the phenomena that take place in it: how charged particles interact with neutral ones, how the atypical waves that we observed are formed. All this together works for a very important task – to understand the structure of the near-Earth space and use it as a natural detector of processes in various geospheres,” explained the scientist.

The work published by scientists calls the pair of bursts a “man-made non-chemical depletion” referring to the amount of electrons detected in the ionosphere. The depletion, or hole in the ionosphere created by the detonations, spread across lower North America—however, conformable Popular Mechanics, the exact size of the hole is still to be determined.

Missiles pass through the ionosphere all the time, but it’s rare for a missile to detonate up there – and even rarer still to explode twice from a launch. Hopefully, with the information gained from the SpaceX failure, scientists can better understand how the ionosphere responds to human actions. And maybe someone can one more time build a spaceship that really works.

A version of this article originally appeared on Jalopnik.