Artemis II launch ionosphere disturbances, Digi Mart USA News: NASA’s Artemis II mission caused enormous disturbances in Earth’s atmosphere that scientists say could have disrupted GPS and other communications.
A pre-print study by scientists from National Cheng Kung University in Taiwan found that the disturbances created by the launch of the Artemis II rocket were stronger than those caused by any other rocket launch to date. The team says the research could point to future problems caused by increasingly powerful rocket launches becoming more frequent.
The Artemis II mission was arguably the biggest spaceflight story of 2026. It launched on April 1, 2026, carrying four astronauts on a nine-day journey around the Moon and back.
Artemis II travelled farther beyond the Moon than any mission before it, using the Moon’s gravitational pull to slingshot around it and begin the journey back to Earth. It was the first crewed mission to the Moon since the Apollo program and marked a key step in NASA’s plans to establish a permanent human presence on the lunar surface.
Despite the mission’s success and popularity, the pre-print study, published in Geophysical Research Letters, says the launch of the Artemis II rocket and its subsequent rocket burns caused three distinct disturbances in Earth’s ionosphere. The ionosphere is the region of the atmosphere that reaches about 80 to 640 kilometers (50 to 400 miles) above Earth’s surface, marking the boundary between the lower atmosphere and the vacuum of space.
The first disturbance occurred during the rocket’s launch from Kennedy Space Center, generating shock-acoustic and gravity wave modulations. The next two upper-stage burns were much stronger than the initial liftoff.
An hour after launch, a second disturbance came from the apogee raise burn, an engine burn used to increase the Artemis II spacecraft’s altitude. About 25 hours after liftoff, a third was caused by the trans-lunar injection burn, which puts the spacecraft on its journey toward the Moon.
The study authors say the apogee raise burn “triggered shock waves and unprecedented large-scale disturbances that elongated 50° longitude across North America.” They added: “This is the first time a single space mission produced three instances of ionospheric disturbances over the same region during successive orbit maneuvers.”
A key point made by the authors is the possible effect future rocket launches could have on technologies such as GPS systems, drones and self-driving cars. While they found no widespread GPS disruption caused by the Artemis II liftoff itself, they did record ionospheric changes that could potentially cause problems during future launches.
Such disturbances could disrupt communications on Earth by, for example, interfering with radio signals. Rocket launches could also affect other Earth-based technologies that rely on GPS for positioning, including self-driving cars and drones.
