UAF lands $9.3M grant to expand research at HAARP

The HAARP antenna array. (courtesy University of Alaska Fairbanks)

A National Science Foundation grant will allow the University of Alaska Fairbanks to expand its activities at the High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program in Gakona.

The U.S. military built HAARP in the 1990s for $290 million to conduct ionospheric research related to communications, navigation, surveillance and other applications. But in 2015 the Air Force ended the program and turned the HAARP facility over to the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

UAF has since operated it sporadically for government and independent clients.

“We’ve been charging a little over $5,000 an hour to use the facility,” UAF Geophysical Institute Director Bob McCoy said. “But we haven’t had very many hours, so it’s been costing us quite a bit.”

McCoy says five-year, $9.3 million grant from the National Science Foundation will enable the university to maintain the HAARP facility and expand operations.

“Now we can open it up fully and invite in people to use it, so it’s a really big deal for us,’ McCoy said.

McCoy says the HAARP station is the most powerful of three ionospheric research facilities on the planet. It uses hundreds of high frequency radio transmitters and antennas, to probe the ionosphere.

McCoy says it’s a tool that will be increasingly valuable for scientific experiments involving the aurora as the solar cycle peaks.

“The next four or five years, the ionosphere should get a lot more exciting,” McCoy said. “You should see, in the winter, a lot more dynamic aurora.”

HAARP is also useful as a remote sensing tool, an application McCoy says is in demand as the Arctic warms and countries vie for control of it.

“We can actually look north several hundred miles from Alaska, and we can study the ocean,” McCoy said. “We can measure sea ice, and we can look for aircraft or ships out in the Arctic Ocean. HAARP can transmit, say, to the north, reflect off the ionosphere down to the sea ice, and you pick up that signal again either with an antenna or a satellite.”

McCoy says a separate grant will provide a million dollars to build and locate a LIDAR instrument at the HAARP site, for study of other parts of the upper atmosphere. That, together with other instrumentation UAF plans to relocate to the HAARP site, will make up what’s being called the Subauroral Geophysical Observatory for Space Physics and Radio Science.

Correction: The original version of this story put the dollar amount of the NSF grant at $3 million. The correct amount is $9.3 million.

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