A JetBlue plane that suddenly plummeted thousands of feet in October, sending 15 people on board to the hospital, could have been hit by a cosmic ray from a distant supernova explosion, a space expert said. The Airbus 320, which was headed from Cancun to New Jersey, was forced to make an emergency landing Oct. 30 in Tampa, Florida, after a fierce bout of turbulence, which Airbus claimed was caused by cosmic radiation from the sun interfering with the 20-year-old plane’s navigation computer. However, Clive Dyer, a space and radiation expert from the University of Surrey, said radiation levels on Oct. 30 were unremarkable and not strong enough to affect the flight. Instead he said the flight was hit by “a stream of high-energy particles from a distant star explosion that may have traveled millions of years before reaching Earth,” according to Space.com. “Cosmic rays can interact with modern microelectronics and change the state of a circuit,” Dyer told the site. “They can cause a simple bit flip, like a 0 to one or one to 0. They can mess up information and make things go wrong. But they can cause hardware failures too, when they induce a current in an electronic device and burn it out.” Airbus grounded 6,000 A320 jets following the incident and upgraded its software to protect them against future cosmic radiation. A September report showed an increase in solar activity from the sun, which could produce radiation “a thousand times higher than cosmic rays, and then many aircraft could be bothered by it,” Dyer added.
The post JetBlue Plane That Suddenly Plunged Could Have Been Hit by Cosmic Rays appeared first on The Daily Beast