NORWAY-NORTHERN LIGHTS ROCKET Northern Lights rocket launch could solve GPS interference

Record ID: 149443

  • Title: NORWAY-NORTHERN LIGHTS ROCKET Northern Lights rocket launch could solve GPS interference
  • Date: 23rd July 2015
  • Summary: OSLO, NORWAY (RECENT) (REUTERS) VARIOUS OF ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR AT DEPARTMENT OF PHYSICS, WOJCIECH MILOCH (PRON: Voy-chick Millock), EXAMINING PROBES DESIGNED AT UNIVERSITY OF OSLO (SOUNDBITE) (English) ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR AT DEPARTMENT OF PHYSICS, WOJCIECH MILOCH, SAYING: "This small probe allows us to measure the electron density with sounding rockets at very high resolut
  • Embargoed: 7th August 2015 13:00
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  • Topics: General
  • Reuters ID: LVA3AIS54ZWCWHA6UOBZBF6MK9N4
  • Aspect Ratio: 16:9
  • Story Text: Norwegian researchers who fired a rocket into the Northern Lights to examine why loose electrons caused by solar flares interfere with navigation and communication systems have begun the slow process of analysing their data. They eventually hope their work will allow them to accurately predict the weather in space.
    The team from the University of Oslo (UiO) aimed its ICI4 rocket into the electron clouds inside Aurora Borealis in February, firing it at a speed of one kilometre per second towards its target.
    The launch was delayed by 11 days due to heavy winds and poor space weather. PhD student Andres Spicher was in the control room when the decision was finally made to launch. He told Reuters: "What we wanted to observe is a cloud of plasma, a cloud of electrons coming into the Aurora. That happens really fast and this cloud of plasma moves at about 500 metres per second, and we also wanted to have our rockets exactly there when the cloud would encounter the Aurora and the rocket flies at one kilometre per second, so it's really fast as well. So we had maybe one or two minutes to decide whether we would press the button."
    As well as creating the Northern Lights - one of the world's most celebrated natural phenomena - solar flares also help tear electrons loose from the atmosphere. Electron clouds are then formed and drift across the Arctic Ocean. These electron clouds are invisible to our eyes, but disruptive for navigation and communication systems. The most serious interferences occur when electron clouds coincide with the Aurora Borealis.
    "The Sun is constantly bombarding the Earth with a very hot gas, with a solar wind, and that gas is made of electrons and protons and when that solar wind reaches the Earth the particles manage to follow the magnetic field lines and as the magnetic field lines converge towards the poles this particle will just follow the field lines and get in our atmosphere at about 250 kilometres (between 80 and 800 kilimetres) altitude and collide with the particles in our atmosphere, with the neutrals and then these interactions between particles with origins in the Sun and origins here will create the Aurora Borealis," said Spicher.
    No technology exists to eliminate this problem and the team hopes that their research could unlock the mystery, with the help of a multi-needle probe system designed at the UiO. The Langmuir probe includes four needles pointing towards each of the cardinal points, and takes 8,000 electronic measurements every second, compared to around 30 per second on traditional probes.
    Associate Professor at the UiO Department of Physics, Wojciech Miloch, said the probes are now being used by NASA on some of their own rockets, with the European Space Agency (ESA) set to follow suit for its space weather program.
    "This small probe allows us to measure the electron density with sounding rockets at very high resolution," he said. "This is the Langmuir probe, the probe that collects electrons and ions free charges in the ionosphere and from that we can actually understand the structures and processes that are occurring, that are happening in the high latitude ionosphere in the Aurora."
    Miloch is confident the probes will allow the UiO team access to unprecedentedly accurate data that could enable scientists to improve global positioning systems (GPS) and communication systems, as well as accurately predicting space weather.
    "With this particular instrument we can go down to the very small scales, centimetre scales, so when we launched the rocket and at the same time we have the ground instruments operating as a support then we can cover a wide range of scales, we can start from A and go to Z, so we can try to understand the whole processes that is really behind all the phenomena," said Miloch.
    Norwegian electronics firm Eidel is currently refining the instrument for use in space exploration and Miloch says it could revolutionise the field.
    Although the UiO team knew within minutes that the ICI4 had successfully made contact with the Northern Lights, full analysis of the data could take some years.
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