![]() Scientists already knew that a nuclear blast in space behaves very differently from one on the ground, says Spriggs. Flares were set off in hopes of distracting local birds from the blinding flash to come. Airplanes and boats got into position to record the test in as many ways as possible. The military also sent up 27 smaller missiles laden with scientific instruments to measure its effects. ![]() Nuclear lift offĪfter four days of delays, waiting for the perfect weather, Starfish Prime was launched on the tip of a Thor rocket from Johnston Atoll, an island about 750 nautical miles southwest of Hawaii. Kennedy told reporters in a tongue-in-cheek tone, “I know there has been disturbance about the Van Allen belt, but Van Allen says it is not going to affect the belt. During a press conference in May 1962, President John F. ![]() And that was a shocker back then.”īefore the test, scientists thought the impact of Starfish Prime on Earth’s radiation belts would be minimal. “Van Allen’s discovery was worrying because it said any future spacecraft or astronaut that we send up is going to be exposed to this radiation. “As Van Allen said when he discovered the radiation belts, space is not empty, space is radioactive,” says David Sibeck, a scientist for NASA’s Van Allen Space Probes mission. ![]() They then interact with other electrons in the region to accelerate them to higher speeds or push them into Earth’s upper atmosphere. These waves are created by electrons spiraling along magnetic field lines around Earth. NASA’s Van Allen Probes recorded these chorus waves in space above Earth. They were subsequently named Van Allen belts after James Van Allen, the University of Iowa scientist who discovered them. Just two years earlier, America’s first satellite, Explorer 1, accidentally discovered that Earth is encircled by donuts of intense radiation held in place by its magnetic field. Scientists and military figures were keen to know what would happen if a nuclear explosion were set off in space, especially how it might interact with Earth’s magnetosphere. There was even a plan, which ultimately fizzled, to set off a nuclear blast on the moon. The Department of Defense was in the midst of a separate project to put 500 million copper needles into orbit to try to reflect radio waves and help long-distance communication. military didn’t have many qualms about sending almost anything into space. The space race was in its infancy back then, and the U.S. It was set off in October 1961, about 13,000 feet above an island in the Arctic Circle. had broken from a voluntary moratorium, with the Soviets conducting 31 experimental blasts, including Tsar Bomba, the largest nuclear bomb ever detonated. After three years of no testing, the Soviet Union and the U.S. Cold War heats upĪ year before, in 1961, international negotiations to ban nuclear testing had taken a turn for the worse. “I told my dad years later, ‘You know, if I knew I was going to become a nuclear weapon physicist, I would have paid more attention,’” he says. The memory of that day stuck with Spriggs, who is now a weapons scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, where he works preserving and analyzing archival nuclear test footage. But the results of Starfish Prime serve as a warning of what might happen if Earth’s magnetic field gets blasted again with high doses of radiation, either from another nuke or from natural sources such as the sun. signed the Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, and outer space has been H-bomb free for almost 60 years. The following year, the U.S., the U.K., and the U.S.S.R. An accompanying electromagnetic pulse washed out radio stations, set off an emergency siren, and caused streetlights to black out in Hawaii. “It looked as though the heavens had belched forth a new sun that flared briefly, but long enough to set the sky on fire ,” according to one account in the Hilo Tribune-Herald. For as long as 15 minutes after the initial explosion, charged particles from the blast collided with molecules in Earth’s atmosphere, creating an artificial aurora that could be seen as far away as New Zealand. Starfish Prime exploded at an altitude of 250 miles, at about the height where the International Space Station orbits today. “When that nuclear weapon went off, the whole sky lit up in every direction.
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