this post was submitted on 31 Aug 2024
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[–] [email protected] 91 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Click bait. From an article last year:

These effects may be troublesome, but they are short-lived; re-ionization occurs as soon as the sun comes up again.

https://earthsky.org/todays-image/spacex-launch-punches-a-hole-in-the-ionosphere-red-blob/

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago (1 children)

These effects may be troublesome, but they are short-lived; re-ionization occurs as soon as the sun comes up again.

The problem is when you've got enough short lived microsatellites and Starlink-like constellations and whatnot that you've practically got a whole Kessler's syndrome of the damn things constantly burning up in whatever's left of the ionosphere...

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago (1 children)

This is about rocket launches, not satellites.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

This article seems to put the blame on the shockwave from Starship's rapid unscheduled disassembly in the upper atmosphere (not its launch) but there's also been recent warnings about the effects of metal particulates from such explosions, satellites burning in the atmosphere, and similar pollution on the ionosphere.

All in all, burning or blowing up metallic crap in the upper atmosphere seems to be quite a bad idea.

[–] [email protected] 84 points 2 months ago (1 children)

The article title is misleading, but the research is interesting. Essentially it’s saying that when the rocket self-destructed due to it performing off nominal (as the first test ever of this vehicle) it ionized a large swath of the ionosphere from Mexico to the SE US which can impact the accuracy of GPS for systems that require high precision. The ionosphere reionizes very quickly naturally though so the effects are short lived (hours to maybe a day) and the impact to navigation at least should be small because of how GNSS works with built in corrections for exactly these types of errors. It feels like Nature is stretching a bit with the doom and gloom headline that the authors don’t even point to in the article (though I have not read the paper to be fair).

[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 months ago (1 children)

And to be fair, there's a lot more terrestrial things that causes GPS interference. I work with a guy that runs a boosted CB radio and it causes havoc with GPS signals. EM geometry is really interesting on how signals get encoded. It was fun studying how CDMA and GPS work.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

Wireless engineering concepts are simultaneously interesting while also making me want to take my own life.

It's quite the dichotomy.

All the different ways we've managed to chop up EM waves to implement the incredible wireless technologies we use daily is fascinating. But the math... Dear lord...