DARPA Unintentionally Invents New Rocket ‘Radar’ Thanks to SpaceX

While listening in on the atmosphere, a team of researchers from the U.S. military’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) picked up unexpected disturbances caused by a SpaceX rocket plummeting through the atmosphere toward its landing site. DARPA’s AtmoSense program seeks to use Earth’s atmosphere as a global sensor by measuring acoustic and electromagnetic waves propagating through the atmosphere, and attempting to trace them back to a specific disturbance event that took place on Earth. In doing so, DARPA hopes to be able to trace underground explosions or other national security threats using the signals detected from the atmosphere. During its latest round of listening to the atmosphere, a team used AtmoSense to study sound waves created by controlled explosions in New Mexico. While conducting this work, the team behind the program made an unplanned discovery after noticing something unusual in the sensor data. “As the team was looking at the data, they saw a huge d ... Read full article.