Elon Musk’s rocket creates spectacular blue spiral after dumping fuel
Strangeness in space: Exhaust plume from one of Elon Musk’s SpaceX rockets leaves an eerie blue spiral in the night sky over New Zealand
- Fuel dump from one of Elon Musk’s space rockets lit up the skies over New Zealand
- As the rocket rotated to release its fuel, it created a vapor trail that reflected the sunlight
- Created a spectacular blue swirl over Nelson – a town at the tip of the South Island
- The Falcon 9 rocket with satellites was the third SpaceX launch in 36 hours
One of Elon Musk’s rockets gave New Zealanders a spectacular sight over the weekend — when it dumped its fuel and created a glowing blue swirl in the night sky.
The exhaust plume came from a SpaceX Falcon 9 booster that had just launched a satellite into space, despite some thinking it might have an alien link.
As the rocket whirled around to dissipate its fuel, it created a vapor trail that reflected sunlight, producing a visible blue vortex that eyewitnesses said “quietly” moved across the night sky.
One observer said it “looked like a huge spiral galaxy, just hanging there in the sky, drifting slowly across.”
The plume lit up the sky over Nelson, a town at the tip of New Zealand’s South Island, and traveled 466 miles (750 km) south to Stewart Island around 7:30 p.m. Sunday.
‘Fascinating’: One of Elon Musk’s rockets gave New Zealanders a spectacular sight over the weekend – when it dumped its fuel and created a glowing blue swirl in the night sky (pictured)
Stargazers in the South Island found that the glowing vortex (pictured) was caused by a SpaceX rocket that had dumped its fuel
Stewart Island stargazer Alasdair Burns said the spiral was by far the strangest thing he’d ever seen.
“It was absolutely bizarre. It was like a huge spiral. And it moved very, very slowly, serenely north through the night sky and then just disappeared as it went,” he said. stuff†
“We quickly banged on all our neighbors’ doors to get them out too.
“And so there were five of us, all on our shared porch looking up and a little, well, a little panicked.”
Augustine Matthews, a resident of Māpua, said she ran outside to watch the spiral with her husband.
“It looked like a planet or star. It was just a white dot with a small spiral. And within 10 minutes it had crossed half the sky and the spiral had tripled in size,’ she said.
“It didn’t blink or twinkle, and it moved pretty fast . . . so fascinating.”
It was the company’s third launch in just 36 hours, following the detonation of 53 of its Starlink internet satellites on Friday from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida and a radar satellite for the German military from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California on Saturday.
“The spiral seen in the sky tonight at around 7:30 p.m. was most likely a fuel dump or exhaust plume from a SpaceX rocket launch,” the New Plymouth Astronomical Society wrote in a Facebook post.
“Similar effects have been seen before and SpaceX’s Globalstar 2 FM15 would have passed New Zealand around that time.”
The two-stage rocket was launched Sunday morning from the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida.
It was carrying a communications satellite for Louisiana-based company Globalstar, which SpaceX said was deployed about 1 hour 50 minutes after launch as scheduled.
After sending its payload, the Falcon 9 began to drain its fuel as the rocket’s first stage returned to Earth for a vertical landing on SpaceX’s drone ship.
It was the company’s third launch in just 36 hours, following the explosion of 53 of its Starlink internet satellites on Friday from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida and the launch of a radar satellite for the German military from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California on Saturday.
Elon Musk’s SpaceX launched a Falcon 9 rocket with a Globalstar DM15 satellite on Sunday