The results from the 1962 Starfish Prime test serve as a warning of what might happen if Earth’s magnetic field gets blasted again with high doses of radiation
It was pitch black when Greg Spriggs’ father brought his family to the highest point on Midway Atoll on July 8, 1962. That night on another atoll a thousand miles away, the U.S. military was scheduled to launch a rocket into space to test a“He was trying to figure out which direction to look,” Spriggs recalls. “He thought there was going to be this little flicker, so he wanted to make sure everybody was going to see it.
, 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.It looked as though the heavens had belched forth a new sun that flared briefly, but long enough to set the sky on fire. The space race was in its infancy back then, and the U.S. military didn’t have many qualms about sending almost anything into space. 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.
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