Artemis II Moon Launch Disturbed Earth’s Ionosphere and Could Have Caused GPS Errors, Study Finds

NASA’s Artemis II Moon launch on 1 April 2026 disturbed Earth’s ionosphere so strongly that it could have caused temporary GPS positioning errors of several metres, according to a new study reported on 4 November 2026. Researchers in Taiwan, working with data from about 3,500 ground-based GPS stations across the Americas, found two long disturbances — temporary regions where free electrons in the upper atmosphere were depleted — stretching about 3,100 miles (5,000 kilometres) east to west across North America. The effect was short-lived and localised: no broad GPS outage was reported. But it is the strongest launch-linked disturbance ever measured — up to ten times more intense than the ones left by SpaceX Starship test flights.

Your phone’s GPS does not measure distance directly. It times radio signals from satellites, and those signals must cross the ionosphere — the electrically charged layer of the upper atmosphere, starting about 30 miles (50 kilometres) up — before they reach you. When the number of free electrons along that path changes, the signal’s travel time changes with it, and the position your receiver calculates shifts. On 1 April 2026, the biggest rocket NASA has flown for a crew punched straight through that layer — and then its upper stage fired again, more than an hour after lift-off, right inside it.

Key Facts: Artemis II Ionosphere Disturbances and GPS Errors

Two disturbances, 5,000 kilometres long

The study found not one disturbance but two. The first trailed the SLS core stage — the 212-foot (65-metre) booster that does the heavy lifting off the pad. The second came from two upper-stage thruster burns that sent Orion toward the Moon, more than an hour after lift-off, at about 115 miles (185 kilometres). Both stretched roughly 3,100 miles (5,000 kilometres) east to west across North America — about the width of the continental United States.

The upper-stage disturbance was the stronger of the two, and the reason is straightforward once you picture the flight. The core stage spends most of its burn in dense lower air, far below the ionosphere. The upper stage, by contrast, fires directly inside the charged layer, dumping exhaust gases exactly where GPS signals are most sensitive to electron changes. Thrust is lower up there, but placement is everything. As study co-author Charles Lin, an Earth sciences professor at National Cheng Kung University, told Space.com: “Rocket launches from the ground to space produce that kind of effect, but we have never seen this kind of orbital maneuver in an interplanetary mission.” The quiet burns after launch left the bigger electronic footprint — not the loud, visible liftoff.

How a rocket plume can move your GPS by metres

A large rocket breaks the assumption GPS relies on. Exhaust gases injected at altitude can strip out free electrons or reshape the region around the vehicle’s path. Where electron concentrations drop, the signal delay shifts away from the model, and a receiver that trusts the model reports a position that is a bit wrong. That is exactly what the ground stations picked up: changes in electron density equivalent to positioning errors of several metres. The key word is equivalent — the stations measured electron changes, and the researchers translated them into the position error a receiver would have shown.

Several metres sounds small, and for most of us it is. A navigation app on a phone can tolerate a few metres of drift without anyone noticing. But the margin disappears fast in jobs that depend on precision. Prof Lin put it plainly: “A positioning error of a couple of meters is enough to cause an autonomous car to change lanes.” The same applies to drones holding position by GPS, and to surveying and precision farming, where centimetre-level guidance is the whole point.

Stronger than Starship, despite half the thrust

The comparison with SpaceX’s Starship surprised even people who follow rockets closely. Starship produces roughly twice the liftoff thrust of the SLS, so a simple guess would say it disturbs the ionosphere more. The study found the opposite: the Artemis II disturbances were up to ten times more intense than those seen after Starship test flights, and stronger than any other rocket launch has caused so far. Thrust at the pad turns out not to be the variable that decides this. Where the engines burn, for how long, and what they burn matter more — and a crewed lunar mission, with its high-altitude burns to leave Earth orbit, follows a very different profile from a Starship test flight.

That distinction is why mission planners will read this study carefully. NASA is working toward sending humans back to the surface of the Moon, and more crewed lunar and Mars missions are planned. As Prof Lin told Space.com: “In the future, as we are going to see many more missions going to the Moon and to Mars, these space weather effects will become much more significant.”

About that “hole in the atmosphere” headline

Some headlines said Artemis II “tore a hole in the atmosphere.” That wording needs a straight correction, because it is not what the study found. What the researchers measured were temporary regions where free electrons were depleted — scientists sometimes call these “plasma contrails” or ionospheric holes, but the term is jargon for a dip in electron density, not missing air. Nothing in the reporting describes damage that lasts, a breach of the atmosphere, or any threat to the ozone layer. The surrounding plasma refills the gap over time, and the disturbances were short-lived.

The same caution applies to “GPS was disrupted.” The reports describe detected, temporary, localised positioning errors of several metres at ground stations — not a general GPS outage, failed satellites or anyone actually getting lost. No count of affected users appears in the reporting, and no operational consequence is documented. Anyone claiming more than that has gone past the sources.

What this means for Pakistan — and your phone GPS

Short answer: nothing was reported to change for users in Pakistan. The disturbances were measured over North America, where the flight path and the ground stations were, and they were temporary. GPS signals do cross the ionosphere everywhere on Earth, so the physics applies in principle wherever a big rocket fires high-altitude burns — but no Pakistan impact was reported in this study, and no one should read this story as a warning about phones in Lahore or Karachi. Your GPS was not affected by Artemis II, and this study does not say otherwise.

What is worth knowing is the general lesson: space weather is not only about the Sun. A single large launch can now measurably stir the layer our navigation depends on, at a scale of thousands of kilometres. For readers who enjoy watching the night sky, our Taurid meteor shower guide for Pakistan tonight is the sky event actually visible from here this week. For the longer view, read our El Niño and polar vortex winter outlook for Pakistan — and our Spotify audiobooks guide for Pakistan rounds out the week.

The mission behind the finding

It is easy to forget, amid the ionosphere numbers, what Artemis II actually was. Launched on 1 April 2026 from Kennedy Space Center in Florida, it carried four astronauts around the Moon for the first time in more than half a century. The crew flew within about 4,067 miles of the lunar surface during a flyby on 6 April, reached a record 252,756 miles from Earth, and splashed down in the Pacific Ocean off San Diego on 10 April after a journey of nearly 10 days.

Seven months later, that same flight is still producing science — just not the kind anyone planned. The thousands of GPS stations that caught the disturbance were never built to watch rockets. They belong to public networks that measure tiny ground movements, like slow tectonic shifts, for surveying and earthquake monitoring. A rocket plume that adds noise to those signals can look like ground motion if analysts do not account for it. So the finding cuts two ways: a warning for navigation, and a data-quality lesson for geoscience.

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