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Space
July 8, 2022. On July 9, 1962, the US military detonated a thermonuclear warhead 250 miles above the Pacific Ocean – a test called “Starfish Prime.” Starfish Prime created an artificial solar storm complete with auroras, geomagnetic activity, and blackouts caused by the electromagnetic pulse (EMP) – a ferocious burst of radiation that ionized the upper atmosphere. Witnesses from Hawaii to New Zealand reported auroras overhead, magnificent midnight “rainbow stripes” that tropical sky watchers had never seen before. Radios fell silent, then suddenly became noisy. Streetlights went dark in Honolulu. The explosion led to the early demise of all the spacecraft in orbit at the time. These included Ariel-1, the UK’s first spacecraft, and Telstar-1, a US communications satellite which had the bad luck to be launched the very next day. Ariel-1 became almost unusable after 4 days due to power degradation and tape recorder failure. The Telstar satellite lasted until November 1962 when its command decoder failed. The explosion filled Earth’s magnetosphere with energetic electrons and added to our planet’s natural radiation belts. These artificial electrons hit satellites hard, degrading their electronics and solar arrays. There were increased fluxes of trapped electrons for many years after the blast. Ionized air over the Pacific pinned down Earth’s magnetic field, then let it go again when the ionization subsided. The rebound created a manmade geomagnetic storm for hundreds of miles around the blast zone. In 1962 the Cold War was red hot. (Source: SpaceWeatherArchive)
See also: Photo (Source: NewAtlas): https://tinyurl.com/2het3dsv
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