I'm taking the liberty of reworking their "plain language summary." I aimed for maintaining accuracy with relaxed precision, but please correct me if I've lost too much of either in the process.
I corrected a specific bit of imprecision in language in the source's plaintext summary not clearly distinguishing between vertical/y v. vertical/z, something the technical abstract clarified by stating "vertical altitude."
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In plainest language, the rocket was lobbed up, not hurled forward, and this resulted in a shock wave that was followed some interesting reactions in the ionosphere between the rocket exhaust plume and the plasma in the ionosphere, all of which need further study because of potential risks to things like how accurate your GPS might be in the area around the "hole" caused by these reactions.
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Plain(er) Language Summary
On 24 August 2017, a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket took off from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, carrying Taiwan's FORMOSAT‐5 Earth observation satellite into orbit. The lightly weighted solo payload lets the rocket fly a path higher than the bare minimum to insert the payload directly where it needs to operate (the mission altitude), at 720 km. This unique nearly vertical path away from the ground is different from the usual satellite launches where rockets fly over horizontal paths more closely to the ground and insert satellites at 200 km above Earth and rely on orbit maneuvers to reach mission altitudes. Because of this lofty (more vertical) launch path, the rocket launch generated a gigantic circular shock wave in the ionosphere covering a wide area four times greater than California. It is followed by an ionospheric hole (plasma depletions) due to rapid chemical reactions of rocket exhaust plumes and ionospheric plasma. Large spatial gradients caused by these reactions and the resulting hole could lead to ~1 m range errors into GPS navigation and positioning system. Understanding how the rocket launches affect our upper atmosphere and space environment is important as these human-caused space weather events are expected to increase at an enormous rate in the near future.
~1m range errors in the pseudorange from just the satellites which are on the other side of this hole, is a relatively small error, and certainly within or close to normal ionosphere and troposphere fluctuation impact on GNSS performance.
This would not be noticeable at all on a standard GNSS like the one in your phone.
Survey receivers use (at least) two frequencies which allows a simple calculation to determine pretty much exactly the delay due to the ionosphere, so they aren't affected by this at all.
This is an interesting anomaly, but GNSS is built to cope with this under normal usage, so it's inconsequential as far as I can tell.
If anyone has time and wants to see for yourself, 'CORS' - continuously operating reference stations, are available all over the place around where this happened, and the raw receiver data is freely available. You can download it and because you know the exact position of each receiver, you will be able to see the exact impact of this event at which ever location you would like to analyze.
Various open source tools are out there to process the data such as gLab and RTKLIB.
If anyone has the time to give it a crack and needs a hand or guidance feel free to ping me here.
We sure need to study the ability to affect the ionosphere. And then people will build weapons capable of doing it in suitable ways. Unless they already have those.
* Note: University of Alaska fairbanks appears to have taken over HAARP and converted it to a "Fee based" research center -- much like a radiotelescope at other academic institutions I assume?
Looks like HAARP is rather limited in comparison, I don't think it can affect the ionosphere so drastically. But yeah the same kind of device, just less potent.
hmm, I put your "plainest" language answer into XKCD simple writer, and there was some complexity in there.
In most simple language, the space truck was thrown up, not tossed forward, and this caused a sound wave that was followed with some interesting events in one of the high bits of the sky, between the space truck refuse air and the hotter-than-air stuff in the high sky, all of which need further study because of possible bad things like how true your sky-computer computer-map might be in the area around the "hole" caused by these waves.
Why? Decreasing language complexity sounds like a good idea. It's not like "question" or "request" are going away, it's just adding a simple context-specific word that is already used in similar situations.
I corrected a specific bit of imprecision in language in the source's plaintext summary not clearly distinguishing between vertical/y v. vertical/z, something the technical abstract clarified by stating "vertical altitude."
---
In plainest language, the rocket was lobbed up, not hurled forward, and this resulted in a shock wave that was followed some interesting reactions in the ionosphere between the rocket exhaust plume and the plasma in the ionosphere, all of which need further study because of potential risks to things like how accurate your GPS might be in the area around the "hole" caused by these reactions.
---
Plain(er) Language Summary
On 24 August 2017, a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket took off from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, carrying Taiwan's FORMOSAT‐5 Earth observation satellite into orbit. The lightly weighted solo payload lets the rocket fly a path higher than the bare minimum to insert the payload directly where it needs to operate (the mission altitude), at 720 km. This unique nearly vertical path away from the ground is different from the usual satellite launches where rockets fly over horizontal paths more closely to the ground and insert satellites at 200 km above Earth and rely on orbit maneuvers to reach mission altitudes. Because of this lofty (more vertical) launch path, the rocket launch generated a gigantic circular shock wave in the ionosphere covering a wide area four times greater than California. It is followed by an ionospheric hole (plasma depletions) due to rapid chemical reactions of rocket exhaust plumes and ionospheric plasma. Large spatial gradients caused by these reactions and the resulting hole could lead to ~1 m range errors into GPS navigation and positioning system. Understanding how the rocket launches affect our upper atmosphere and space environment is important as these human-caused space weather events are expected to increase at an enormous rate in the near future.