Poker Flat Aurora Borealis Research Continues with Rocket Launches

Aurora Borealis research is advacing this year with ongoing space flight data collection studies from Alaska's Poker Flat Research Range with a series of two rockets launched last month known as the Auroral Current and Electrodynamics Structure mission. Other missions to research the Northern Lights are underway for 2009 and 2010.

The Auroral Current and Electrodynamics Structure mission seeks to gain a clearer picture of aurora structure by simultaneously collecting data from both the top and bottom edges of an auroral arc according to the Principal Investigator Scott R. Bounds of the University of Iowa.

Dr. Bounds indicated information from the ACES mission will help refine current models of aurora structure as well as provide insight on the structural subtleties of the aurora, details that researchers may have missed when previous measurements were done using only a single space probe vehicle.

The Geophysical Institute at the University of Alaska Fairbanks operates the range under contract to NASA Wallops Flight Facility on the Eastern Shore of Virginia. Poker Flat Research Range is the largest land-based sounding rocket range in the world. It's located 30 miles north of Fairbanks on the Steese Highway. The site enables significant academic research and data collection on the Northern Lights. More on recent rocket launches from the Poker Flat Research Range as reported by The Fairbanks Daily News Miner, EurekAlert, and SpaceTravel.