EISCAT

Hihi,

This past week I've been doing fieldwork at EISCAT. This is the last of our fieldwork, sadly.

There are four EISCAT facilities, in Finland, mainland Norway, Sweden and Svalbard. They are a system of incoherent scatter radars that measure the ionosphere and magnetosphere for changes in, for example, electron density. Using this data things like the aurora can be measured.

The station in Svalbard is made up of two radars, a 42m dish that is fixed to be aligned with the Earths magnetic field, and a 32m dish that can be pointed where you want.

That's us!

Our week was split into three parts. One part was running our own experiment. I was in a team with Elliot, and we were trying to measure a substorm. We put the dish facing South, as we are north of the auroral oval here,  and at 30 degrees elevation, hoping to see some activity. We didn't the first time, as the sky didn't want to play nice, but it was still fun to operate the system and move the big radar dish around. On Friday we got the chance to redo the experiment, and this time we had some success! We were teased for a long time as the aurora was just off where we could measure it, but happily it moved in the final 10 minutes.

The control room

42m dish

32m dish

The second part to the week was making a "cantenna", ie our own radar out of fruit tins. This was a lot of fun, as we got to use hammers, soldering irons and big drills. They're always fun! As you can see, it was all totally safe and we didn't almost crush Elliot's fingers on the kitchen table.

The cantenna was a success, and we used it to measure our speeds as we ran up and down the hallway. Then we went outside and drove a car at it (and us) in the slippery car park. Again, totally safe. Then we all ran around pretending to be a plasma cloud, to see how that looked. Science!

Beautiful

The third thing we did was design and run an experiment that the lecturer (Lisa) came up with that hasn't been done before, which was to point the EISCAT 32m dish and the superDARN network (another set of radars in Svalbard) in the same place, and essentially see if they see the same thing. This was tricky for various technical reasons, such as how they see different altitudes, and scan the sky at different rates, but in the end we got a good experiment out of it. Lisa says that if all goes well, it might be turned into a paper that we'd be co-authors of! That's nice because I'm not sure if I'll ever do a PhD, so this may be my only chance.

It was a fun week, and I did lots of exploring at the weekend. I'll put that in another post though as this one's getting quite long. 

Emma