When the space shuttle Orbiting Maneuver Subsystem (OMS) engines burn in the ionosphere, two types of effects are produced. First, charge exchange between the exhaust molecules and the ambient O+-ions yields beams of high-speed molecular ions that can excite plasma turbulence. Second, the molecular ions eventually recombine with electrons to yield a plasma hole. The ion-beam interactions and the formation of artificial plasma holes in the ionosphere have been studied with ground-based, incoherent-scatter radars (ISRs) during the Shuttle Ionospheric Modification with Pulsed Localized Exhaust (SIMPLEX) series of experiments. The SIMPLEX II experiment took place in late July 1999 during the STS-93 flight of the Space Shuttle Columbia. The Orbital Maneuver Subsystem (OMS) engines provided controlled ion injections over the incoherent scatter radar (ISR) facilities located at Arecibo, Puerto Rico to excite unusual radar signatures. After charge exchange between the exhaust and the ambient plasma, pickup ions were produced with velocities near 10 km/s using a ram-burn orientation of the OMS engines relative to the vehicle orbit vector. During the SIMPLEX II experiment, the ISR spectra of the exhaust-modified plasma were obtained for the first time. The formation of ring-ion beam distributions was determined from curve fitting to the radar spectra. These spectra show the presence of the nonthermal ion distributions and enhanced scatter from electrons for thermal ion distributions with elevated ion temperatures. Analysis of the ion distributions in the modified ionosphere indicates that they were unstable and may have quickly generated plasma waves that along with ion-neutral collisions changed the ion-velocity distributions. The observations show that the perpendicular ion speed was rapidly reduced from 10 km/s to about 1 km/s. These observations open up the possibility of conducting a new series of experiments studying ring-ion beam instabilities that occur naturally in the auroral-region ionosphere and artificially in the space shuttle exhaust where there is large relative motion between the ion and neutral species.