© IE Online Media Services Pvt Ltd
Tags:
Journalism of Courage
Firefly Aerospace launched a rocket carrying a United States Space Force satellite on September 14, within just 24 hours of receiving a launch notice, which could be a new world record. But this launch may have accidentally punched a hole in the ionosphere, which is part of Earth’s upper atmosphere.
The Victus Nox satellite is a Space Force experiment to test Firefly’s ability to launch a military satellite with just a 24-hour notice—a “responsive launch.” The last responsive space launch experiment took off on June 13, 2023, taking around 21 days from notice to completion.
After the launch, a bright exhaust cone covered a large area of the sky during astronomical darkness, reports Spaceweather.com. After this expanding cone faded, there was a slight red afterglow, which could have been caused by the rocket punching a hole in the ionosphere.
Victus Nox is Latin for “conqueror of the night”, and the satellite will run a space domain awareness mission, which will help Space Force stay informed about what is happening in the orbital environment.
The ionosphere refers to a series of regions in our planet’s atmosphere that contains electrically charged molecules and atoms. It plays an important role in communications and navigation systems since radio and GPS signals either travel through it or bounce off it to reach their destination, according to NASA. Changes in the ionosphere’s composition and density can disrupt signals in both cases.
Rocket engines spray water and carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, reducing local ionisation by as much as 70 per cent. Sometimes, this is followed by a series of complicated reactions that produce a certain red light.
Apart from the red light, holes like that can also affect low-frequency radio communications and even cause glitches in GPS systems. But these effects are usually temporary because reionisation restarts after the Sun rises again. A similar hole was created by a SpaceX launch in June this year.
