This redefined shooting star.
It’s not just spacecraft that are impacted by the horrors of deep space. In October, 15 people were hospitalized after a cosmic ray sent a New Jersey-bound JetBlue flight plunging thousands of feet — a phenomenon that could potentially pose a threat to air travel.
“We have lots and lots of airplanes flying every day, so very occasionally these things will occur,” Casey Dreier, Chief of Space Policy at The Planetary Society, told The Post. “If a particle strikes a critical circuit in a computer, it can corrupt the computer’s memory, sensor data, or potentially cause other damage.”
This was allegedly the case with the aforementioned aircraft, which had been flying from Cancun, Mexico, to Newark when it was struck by a stream of high-energy particles from a distant supernova blast that traveled millions of years, UK space experts claimed.
Pilots regained control and made an emergency landing in Tampa, Florida, but roughly 20 passengers sustained serious injuries, including bleeding head wounds.
“This caused what’s called a ‘bit flip,’ corrupting data in the flight computer and triggering sudden altitude loss,” Dreier explained. “The pilots recovered quickly, but yes, it could have been worse.”
However, Dreier emphasized that this is a “hypothesis” and not an “official conclusion of what caused the incident.”
That being said, the space expert did warn that planes could be impacted by “cosmic rays,” which are “everywhere” and “constantly bombard Earth.”
Thankfully, threats from interstellar salvos are “not common for air travel because of the protections of Earth’s magnetic field and atmosphere,” he said. “In space, it’s much worse, which is why most spacecraft use specialized hardware designed to protect sensitive components from such events.”
Thankfully, while these particle strikes occur constantly, the “odds of one hitting a critical circuit at just the wrong moment are very low,” according to Dreier.
Although he noted that the risk was higher when the sun is active due to powerful particle bursts from solar flares.
However, those interstellar particulate strikes aren’t the only threats from the cosmos. Dreier also warned about solar storms that can disrupt GPS, impact radio communications and even torpedo the power grid.
In May, a colossal solar storm just zapped the daylight side of the planet, causing global blackouts and knocking out radio signals across Europe, Asia and the Middle East.
Unfortunately, safeguarding ourselves against these deep-space radio disruptors is no mean feat.
“There are both hardware and software improvements that can be made, particularly in error correction algorithms and possibly even deploying better radiation shielding on sensitive electronics,” said Dreier. “That’s expensive, though, and the relative rarity of these events may limit the amount of effort and money deployed to address it.”
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