Did NASA's SLS Rocket Punch a Hole in the Upper Atmosphere? What the Artemis II Study Found

In early November 2026, headlines claimed that NASA's Artemis II moon mission "tore a hole" in Earth's upper atmosphere and disrupted GPS. The story comes from a real study, but the headlines get three things wrong.

The short answer. Researchers at National Cheng Kung University (NCKU) in Taiwan used about 3,500 GNSS receivers in the Americas to measure the ionosphere during Artemis II. They found three separate disturbances in the ionosphere, the layer of charged gas between about 80 and 600 km up (NOAA SWPC):

1. At liftoff on 1 April 2026. This was the weakest of the three, even though the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket released by far the most energy.
2. About 2 hours later, when the SLS upper stage fired to raise Orion's orbit. This was the strongest. It stretched more than 5,000 km across North America.
3. About 25 hours after launch, when Orion's own engine fired to send the crew to the Moon. This was similar to the second but weaker.

The preprint describes these mainly as waves, not holes. It does not report any GPS outage. The researchers say they will study the electron "holes" (depletions) separately (Choi, Lin et al., preprint).

How we wrote this. We read the full text of the preprint, a PDF version titled "Rare multiple ionospheric disturbances observed during the Artemis-II Lunar flyby voyage", on 6 November 2026. The ESSOAr record gives a slightly different title, "Rare reoccurring…", so the text we read may be a revised version. Mission facts come from NASA. We also compared the paper with news coverage. The study is a preprint: it has not yet completed peer review, and its numbers may change.

What is the ionosphere, and what is an "ionosphere hole"?

Sunlight strips electrons from gas atoms high in the atmosphere. The result is the ionosphere, a layer of free electrons and ions that reflects some radio waves and slows down signals from navigation satellites (NOAA SWPC).

Scientists measure it with total electron content (TEC): the number of free electrons in a column of sky between a receiver and a satellite. One TEC unit (TECU) is 10¹⁶ electrons per square metre. Normal values range from a few to several hundred TECU (NOAA SWPC).

Rockets disturb the ionosphere in two broad ways:

• Waves. A rocket moving faster than sound creates shock waves and pressure pulses. These travel upward and outward and make electron density rise and fall in ripples. Scientists call them traveling ionospheric disturbances (TIDs).
• Holes (depletions). Rocket exhaust is mostly water vapour and hydrogen when the engines burn liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen. Released at ionosphere heights, these molecules speed up the chemical reactions that remove free electrons. The result is a patch with fewer electrons than normal.

Neither is a hole in the air. The atmosphere does not leak into space. An "ionosphere hole" is a temporary region with fewer charged particles. The Sun's radiation refills it, usually within hours.

This is not new. A 1975 paper in Science described a "large-scale hole in the ionosphere" after the Saturn V launch of Skylab in 1973 (Mendillo, Hawkins and Klobuchar, Science 187, 343–346). In August 2017, a SpaceX Falcon 9 launching the FORMOSAT-5 satellite left a hole about 900 km wide. The same NCKU group studied it, and lead researcher Charles Lin estimated it caused about a 1-metre error in GPS navigation (Ars Technica, 2018; Chou et al., Space Weather, 2018).

What happened during Artemis II

Artemis II launched on 1 April 2026 from Kennedy Space Center. It carried NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen around the Moon. Orion splashed down on 10 April 2026 after a mission of 9 days, 1 hour and 32 minutes (NASA).

Three different engines matter for this story:

Sources: NASA SLS overview and the preprint.

The preprint times these events as follows. Liftoff was at about 22:35 UT on 1 April. About 49 minutes later, a perigee raise burn lifted the lowest point of the orbit to 185 km. About 108 minutes after launch, the ICPS fired for about 18 minutes in the apogee raise maneuver (ARM), putting Orion into a high Earth orbit. The trans-lunar injection (TLI) burn by Orion's OMS-E began at 23:49 UT on 2 April and lasted 5 minutes 50 seconds.

The three disturbances, compared

All figures are from the preprint. For context, the authors say earlier rocket launches produced disturbances of about 0.5–0.75 TECU that lasted 15–20 minutes. The Artemis II ARM and TLI disturbances lasted over an hour.

Why the smaller engines caused the bigger effect

This is the most interesting finding. The SLS core stage released far more energy than either later burn. The authors estimate the ICPS and Orion burns released one to two orders of magnitude less. Yet those later burns produced disturbances roughly 4 to 9 times stronger, using a like-for-like comparison of filtered TEC data.

The reason is altitude. During liftoff, most of the rocket's energy goes into the dense lower atmosphere. Only waves that travel upward reach the ionosphere, and they weaken along the way. The ICPS and Orion burns fired inside the ionosphere, so their exhaust heated and pushed the plasma directly.

These upper burns also moved at orbital speed, about 8–10 km/s. The engine acted like a moving heat source that dragged a disturbance along its path. That is why the second and third disturbances form long, narrow bands that travel at the spacecraft's speed, not the round or V-shaped ripples seen after earlier launches.

The authors say the main lesson is that the height where a rocket releases energy matters as much as the amount. They call orbital maneuver burns inside the ionosphere a distinct and repeatable source of human-made space weather.

Why were all three over North America?

The liftoff disturbance appeared near Florida. The ARM burn began over northern Mexico (about 28.5°N, 107.7°W), and the TLI burn began a little farther west. Both then crossed the United States. This is also where dense networks of GNSS receivers exist, so the disturbances could be mapped in detail. A burn over open ocean would be much harder to see.

Did it actually break GPS?

The preprint we read does not report any GPS outage, navigation failure or effect on cars, drones or aircraft. It does not give a figure for positioning error. Its conclusion says only that continued monitoring is needed to assess possible effects on GNSS applications and high-frequency radio.

Some coverage said the disturbances could shift GPS positions by several metres. That figure does not appear in the text we read. Newsweek's report says there is no evidence that self-driving cars, drones or accidents were affected, and no widespread GPS outage was reported (Newsweek).

A rough calculation shows the likely scale. A single-frequency GPS receiver on the L1 frequency, f = 1575.42 MHz, sees an extra signal delay from the ionosphere of about

$$\Delta d = \frac{40.3 \times \mathrm{TEC}}{f^2}$$

where TEC is in electrons per square metre. For 1 TECU (10¹⁶ electrons/m²), this gives about 0.16 m of extra range. So the strongest Artemis II disturbance, 3.7 TECU, would add about 0.6 m to the range to one satellite, more for satellites low on the horizon. How that becomes a position error depends on satellite geometry and the receiver's corrections.

In practice:

• Most phones and cars use a built-in ionosphere model plus other corrections. An extra delay of under a metre that changes over minutes sits inside their normal error. The FAA says basic GPS is usually accurate to about 7 metres, 95% of the time (as reported by Newsweek).
• Dual-frequency receivers remove most of the ionospheric delay by comparing two signals.
• High-precision users (surveying, precision agriculture, some aviation systems) are more sensitive to fast changes in TEC. For them, a fast-moving disturbance can briefly reduce accuracy.

By comparison, NOAA says that ignoring the ionosphere altogether can cause tens of metres of positioning error, and a strong solar storm affects the whole planet (NOAA SWPC). The Artemis II disturbances were regional and lasted about an hour.

What the headlines got wrong

One more caution: the paper's key points line says Orion's engines caused both later disturbances. The body text and its summary figure assign the apogee raise burn to the ICPS, the SLS upper stage, which NASA describes as flying the mission after core stage separation until Orion separates. We follow the body text here.

Why this matters

Artemis II is one launch, and the effect was temporary. The bigger question is what happens as launches multiply. More missions now perform long engine burns at ionosphere heights: upper stages raising orbits, spacecraft heading to the Moon, and deorbit burns. If those burns produce stronger, longer disturbances than liftoff, then scientists who study the human impact on space weather may need to watch orbital maneuvers, not only launches.

It also matters for science. The ionosphere has natural "weather" driven by the Sun. Rocket burns are rare cases where scientists know exactly when, where and how much energy went into it. That makes them useful natural experiments for testing models of how the upper atmosphere responds.

Open questions

• Peer review. The figures may change before final publication.
• The trajectory. NASA's public trajectory data for the period studied began only about 3 hours 22 minutes after launch. The authors reconstructed the earlier path with an orbital model. They note that beyond about 80°W the disturbance drifted south of their estimated path, and it is unclear whether the real flight path differed.
• The depletions. The actual electron holes from the ARM and TLI burns have not yet been analysed.
• Real GPS impact. No study we found has measured positioning errors in real GPS users during the event.

Further reading on BlogAI

• 100 applications of physics in everyday life explains how GPS works and why it needs relativity corrections.
• Science facts that explain how the world works for more everyday science.

References

• Choi, J.-M., Lin, C. C. H., Chou, M.-Y., Rajesh, P. K., Yue, J., Chou, M., Tsai, H.-F., Chen, S.-P., and Wu, W.-C. "Rare reoccurring ionosphere disturbances observed during the Artemis-II Lunar flyby voyage." Preprint, ESSOAr, 2026. essopenarchive.org. Primary source. We read a PDF version titled "Rare multiple ionospheric disturbances observed during the Artemis-II Lunar flyby voyage".
• NASA. "Artemis II." nasa.gov/mission/artemis-ii. Launch and splashdown dates, crew, mission length.
• NASA. "Space Launch System." nasa.gov/humans-in-space/space-launch-system. Core stage and ICPS details.
• NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center. "Ionosphere." spaceweather.gov/phenomena/ionosphere.
• NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center. "Total Electron Content." spaceweather.gov/phenomena/total-electron-content.
• Chou, M.-Y., Shen, M.-H., Lin, C. C. H., et al. "Gigantic circular shock acoustic waves in the ionosphere triggered by the launch of FORMOSAT-5 satellite." Space Weather 16, 172–184 (2018). doi:10.1002/2017SW001738.
• Berger, E. "SpaceX launch last year punched huge temporary hole in the ionosphere." Ars Technica, 22 March 2018. arstechnica.com.
• Mendillo, M., Hawkins, G. S., and Klobuchar, J. A. "A Large-Scale Hole in the Ionosphere Caused by the Launch of Skylab." Science 187, 343–346 (1975).
• Greenwood, A. "Artemis II tore 'hole' in Earth's atmosphere, raising GPS concerns." Newsweek, November 2026. newsweek.com. Secondary coverage.