Black holes, waves, and energized particles from high altitude explosive plasma perturbation experiments

High explosive shaped charge experiments King Crab, Bubble Machine I and II, designed to perturb the ambient plasma and magnetic fields were flown above 460 km on Taurus Tomahawk rockets from Poker Flat in March 1980, 1981, and 1982, respectively. The last two flights were a mother-daughter combination with the instrumentation section remaining attached to the rocket. The first experiment, King Crab, revealed the existence of a barium plasma depleted region or black hole of about 5 km diameter centered on the burst. All electric power to the instruments failed on the liftoff of the 1981 Bubble Machine I, but useful optical data were obtained. The third flight a year later produced useful data from all but the electron detector. Ground based optical and telluric field instrumentation recorded evidence for injection induced waves of about 5 second period. Delay times indicate a slow (175 to 385 km/sec) propagation from the burst point. Concerning locally produced electrostatic instabilities the wave measurements indicate that finite Larmor radius stabilization occurs for the weakly driven low (barium) density situation, but that shorter wavelength waves can occur early in the expansion event when the barium density is higher.