On October 30, a JetBlue Airbus A320 flying from Cancun to Newark suddenly dropped thousands of feet over Florida. At least 15 passengers were injured. The pilots regained control and made an emergency landing at Tampa International Airport. Initially, Airbus blamed intense solar radiation and grounded 6,000 A320 planes for software updates. But scientists found that solar radiation levels that day were normal. Clive Dyer, a space weather and radiation expert from the University of Surrey, told Space.com that a cosmic ray likely hit the plane’s computer. Cosmic rays come from huge star explosions called supernovas. "[Cosmic rays] can interact with modern microelectronics and change the state of a circuit," Dyer explained. This can cause errors or hardware failures. He noted that solar radiation peaked two weeks after the incident, so while software updates were sensible, the sudden altitude drop was caused by a cosmic ray, not solar radiation.