When NASA’s Artemis II rocket lifted off from Florida on April 1, 2026, it made history as the first crewed flight toward the Moon in more than 50 years. It also left a mark on the sky itself. A new study finds that the launch and its engine burns tore two enormous holes in the ionosphere, the charged layer of the upper atmosphere that every GPS signal has to cross, and that the damage was enough to bend GPS positions by several meters across North America.
What the researchers found
The study, published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters by a team at National Cheng Kung University in Taiwan, is based on data from about 3,500 ground based GPS stations across the Americas. Those stations normally do quiet work, such as surveying and measuring tiny movements of the ground. On launch day, they recorded something much louder.
The team found two giant disturbances. One trailed the rocket’s core stage, a section 212 feet (65 meters) long. The other, stronger one followed two burns of the upper stage, which fired inside the ionosphere at about 115 miles (185 kilometers) above Earth. Each disturbance stretched about 3,100 miles (5,000 kilometers) from east to west across North America, and the largest spanned 50 degrees of longitude.
Artemis II also did something no mission had done before. It disturbed the same region three times: at liftoff, in an engine burn about two hours later, and in another burn about 24 hours after launch. “This is the first time a single space mission produced three instances of ionospheric disturbances over the same region during successive orbit maneuvers,” the study says. The effect was up to 10 times more intense than the disturbances recorded after SpaceX Starship test flights, and the strongest yet measured from any rocket launch.
The invisible layer every GPS signal crosses
The ionosphere is a layer of the upper atmosphere that starts about 30 miles (50 kilometers) overhead. Sunlight charges its gases, filling it with free electrons. It is invisible, but it matters to daily life, because GPS satellites orbit far above it. Every signal your phone, car or aircraft receives has to pass through the ionosphere on its way down.
GPS works by timing. A receiver measures how long signals from several satellites take to arrive, and turns those times into a position. The ionosphere slows the signals slightly, and receivers correct for the usual delay. When the layer is calm, the math works well. When something stirs it up, the delay changes, and the receiver’s position shifts with it.
A big rocket stirs it up in two ways. Its exhaust gases react with the charged layer and temporarily use up electrons, leaving a depleted patch, the “hole” in the study. A long engine burn inside the layer also shoves plasma aside like a boat’s wake. The Artemis II team measured electron changes at hundreds of stations that were equal to GPS positioning errors of several meters.
Why a few meters is a big deal
Several meters sounds small until you picture where GPS has to be exact. “A positioning error of a couple of meters is enough to cause an autonomous car to change lanes,” study co-author Charles Lin, an earth science professor at National Cheng Kung University, told Space.com. He added that the effect “could have a strong impact not only on self-driving cars but also on drone positioning.”
Delivery drones hold their place in the air with GPS. Aircraft use satellite navigation on approaches to runways, where a few meters of error is the difference between a comfortable margin and a problem. Even your phone feels it: a dot that drifts one street over is a few meters of error at work. None of that means a launch puts anyone in danger on its own, but it shows how thin the margin is that modern navigation quietly depends on.
Why the effect fades fast, and why it still matters
Here is the honest part of the story. For all the dramatic measurements, the study recorded no GPS failures, no navigation outages, no crashes and no harm of any kind. The several meter errors are values the team calculated from its station data, not a list of things that went wrong on launch day. And the holes did not last: the disturbed trails faded after about an hour as the layer settled back to normal. A severe solar storm, by comparison, can keep GPS shaky for days.
The reason researchers are paying attention is frequency. “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,” Lin told Space.com. Moon missions burn their engines again and again inside the ionosphere, and more of them are coming, along with ever larger rockets flying ever more often. One launch bending GPS for an hour is a curiosity. A sky full of them could become a planning problem for the systems that steer cars, drones and aircraft.
For now, Artemis II remains a scientific first in two directions at once: a crew on its way back to the Moon, and the clearest proof yet that our biggest rockets leave fingerprints on the layer our navigation depends on. You can follow more stories like this in our Technology coverage.
Sources: Geophysical Research Letters study by the National Cheng Kung University team; Space.com reporting, November 4, 2026; People; Newsweek reporting carried by USA Today network papers; Spaceweather.com.