Hawaii auroras July 8, 1962,
Margo...@sonic.net
Me and my kids were lying on a trampoline in Kona, Hawaii summer camp to watch when the whole sky lit up from the test bomb on Johnston Island. I'll never forget it.
From Scientific American:
The auroras over Hawaii on the night of July 8, 1962, were unlike any that humans had ever witnessed. "N-Blast Tonight May Be Dazzling; Good View Likely," read a headline in the Honolulu Advertiser beforehand. Nine seconds after 11 P.M., a startling flash set the sky aglow like eerie daylight, slowly fading from green to yellow to orange before settling on a vivid, unsettling red.
The U.S. had just detonated a thermonuclear bomb 100 times more powerful than the one dropped on Hiroshima. Launched on a missile from Johnston Atoll, a U.S. unincorporated territory between the Marshall Islands and Hawaii, the bomb exploded at 250 miles above Earth's surface—around the altitude in low-Earth orbit of most modern-day satellites. This event, called Starfish Prime, wasn't the first or last time that the U.S. or Soviet Union tested nuclear weapons in space (there were more than a dozen tests between 1958 and 1962), but it was the most impactful. The blast generated a power surge over the Pacific Ocean that knocked out about 300 streetlights on the island of Oahu—and destroyed or damaged about a third of the roughly two dozen satellites then in orbit.
Margot Smith
510-486-8010
510-660-5508 (Text)
Margo...@sonic.net
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