When NASA's Artemis II rocket thundered off the pad at Kennedy Space Center on April 1, it didn't just send four astronauts on humanity's first lunar mission since the Apollo program ended in 1972 — it also tore a massive hole in Earth's upper atmosphere, according to new research out of Taiwan. Scientists say the disturbance was strong enough to produce GPS positioning errors of several meters, though no confirmed GPS failures, navigation disruptions or real-world accidents have been tied to the launch.
Taiwanese Researchers Track the Disturbance
Researchers at Taiwan's National Cheng Kung University studied how the Artemis II Space Launch System rocket affected the ionosphere, the charged layer of the atmosphere that extends roughly 30 to 600 miles above sea level and reflects and modifies the radio waves used for communication and navigation. According to Space.com, the team found that the launch caused ionospheric disturbances that could have triggered temporary, localized errors in GPS positioning. The study was published online as a preprint in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, according to the same report, and in July according to Newsweek's characterization.
The scientists used ground-based GPS receivers to reconstruct how free-electron concentrations shifted as the SLS rocket climbed, timing the travel of satellite signals to those stations, as QZ reported. That method let them map disturbances that unfolded across the Artemis II mission, a 10-day journey that carried the four-person crew around the moon after lifting off from Florida, as NASA has detailed.
Two Holes Stretched Across the Continent
The disturbances were far from subtle. The study identified two ionospheric holes, each stretching about 3,100 miles — roughly 5,000 kilometers — across the American continent from east to west, resembling giant contrails, the outlet's report states. Researchers recorded three separate surges of perturbation in the ionosphere tied to the launch, according to the Taiwan study.
Two upper-stage burns, occurring more than an hour after liftoff at an altitude of about 185 kilometers, appear to have driven much of the effect. The disturbance caused by those second-stage burns inside the ionosphere was far more prominent than the one produced by the SLS core stage, the same report notes. Overall, the measured disturbances were described as more significant than those recorded after other rocket launches studied to date, and up to ten times more intense than what followed test launches of SpaceX's Starship.
What the Numbers Mean for Everyday Navigation
GPS stations detected ionospheric electron-density changes equivalent to positioning errors of several meters during the launch — an equivalent measurement, not confirmation that any GPS device actually malfunctioned. Still, researcher Charles Lin said that scale of error matters: a positioning error of a couple of meters is enough to cause an autonomous car to change lanes, he said, adding that ionospheric changes could strongly affect self-driving cars and drone positioning. The study itself identified potential GPS disruptions rather than confirmed impacts, and no failures, navigation disruptions, accidents or other real-world effects have been documented in connection with the launch.
That caveat matters because the scale of the disturbance was unusual. For comparison, a SpaceX Falcon 9 launch carrying Taiwan's Formosat-5 satellite from Vandenberg Air Force Base in August 2017 produced a circular atmospheric shock wave that researchers said may have caused GPS navigation errors of up to 3.3 feet for an hour or two, a far smaller effect tied to water vapor in the rocket's exhaust interacting with charged particles, as Space.com reported at the time.
More Moon Missions Could Mean More Disruption
Lin said these space weather effects could become much more significant as more missions head to the moon and Mars. QZ's reporting frames the stakes plainly: building toward a sustained human presence on the moon means more heavy rockets leaving Earth, and each one passes through the same layer that navigation transmissions travel through. Powerful rocket launches may become more frequent, Lin said, potentially making ionospheric disturbances more problematic as NASA's lunar ambitions continue.
For now, the Artemis II findings stand as a warning sign rather than a documented failure. The research underscores that as rockets grow larger and lunar traffic increases, scientists will be watching the upper atmosphere as closely as the missions themselves.
