Day 16

Once again, the majority of today was set aside for working on our projects. This morning I spent a while making graphs and writing our abstract. This afternoon we took a field trip to Kellyville, the home of the Sondrestrom radar facility. It is a completely self-reliant site. It is truly like its own town with, as the sign informed us, a population of 7. All the people who work there live on site. It is home to over 20 instruments that monitor the upper atmosphere. This gives it the capability to monitor a wide variety of things, which makes it one of the most important ground-based facilities for studying the interaction of the upper atmosphere with space. The main instrument is the incoherent scatter radar. It is a 32 meter wide satellite dish. It was amazing how big it was and they even moved it around for us to show off what it could do. They are all types of remote sensing. Within remote sensing, we learned there are two different types. Active remote sensing, such as radar, involves sending and receiving signals while passive remote sensing, such as a telescope, involves just observing. The incoherent scatter radar was originally built for the NSA to monitor French nuclear testing. It is called incoherent since it sends a specific frequency and receives a spectrum back. After this ended with the signing of an agreement, however, it was given to the NSF and placed in Chatanika, Alaska. In 1983 it was moved to Kangerlussuaq so it could fill the observational hole that was left by other facilities. This is a very special location since it lies just on the edge of the auroral oval. This is where the aurora can be seen when radiation comes through the atmosphere. The facility collects raw data that it then sends to be processed at SRI in California. This is referred to as basic research since they just collect data without any specific application. This data is then published so everyone can use it. Scientists can apply to get time on the instruments but the radar is limited to 150-250 hours per month since it uses an incredible amount of electricity. As we were walking around the facility, we saw many pipes going through that were only used for keeping the system cool. The work they do monitoring solar activity in the atmosphere is important since solar activity can cause many difficulties with communications and even poses a risk to astronauts in space. They have been monitoring solar cycles in coordination with similar facilities around the world for some time. It takes a lot of data since one solar cycle lasts for 11 years. We were told that we should expect there to be more solar activity in the next year since it is reaching a peak in the cycle. This doesn’t mean that the end of the world is coming in 2012, but just that it would be a great time to go look for the Northern Lights. It was really interesting getting to compare this type of facility with the other types of science and field research that we’ve seen already.

            After we got back that afternoon, everyone got to work doing their part to prepare for our group dinner. We had planned to have a barbeque at the school and it ended up being really nice. We were able to enjoy some good food with a nice view of the glacial river. 

I feel like this is self-explanatory

Me with the incoherent scatter radar

Barbeque time!