Above: Red and yellow dots mark places where the ionosphere’s electron content was disturbed upward; blue dots, mostly near the start of the trail, mark depletions.
Effecting 3,500 GPS stations across the Americas
ARTEMIS II CREATED A GIANT ‘PLASMA CONTRAIL’: You’ve heard of contrails. But plasma contrails? NASA’s Artemis II rocket created a giant one after it launched to the Moon on April 1, 2026.
A new paper accepted for publication in the Geophysical Research Letters shows Artemis’s ionospheric trail stretching more than 5,000 km across North America:
