Press Releases
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The total number of rockets launching from Poker Flat Research Range this season has recently been revised from thirteen to eleven. The reduction is due to the cancellation of a guided rocket project previously scheduled for April that will no longer launch from Poker Flat. 
A single, four-stage sounding rocket successfully launched into the aurora at 11:23 p.m. on Sunday, January 13 from Poker Flat Research Range. The rocket, a Black Brant XII, is part of an experiment designed to use Global Positioning System (GPS) radio signals to understand how oxygen emitted from the aurora triggers the expansion of the ionosphere into space, resulting in the formation of radiation belts.
Four rockets are scheduled to launch from Poker Flat when aurora conditions are suitable at night or in early morning hours this January.
Eleven rockets are scheduled for launch from Poker Flat Research Range this winter, with projects ranging from four rockets launched in rapid succession to measure wind in the upper atmosphere in January to an internationally collaborative student rocket launch in March.
<p>Six thousand reindeer once lived on a remote island in the Bering Sea that was briefly their paradise. In what has become a classic story of wildlife boom and bust, no reindeer live on St. Matthew Island now. Three scientists just looked back at the St. Matthew’s reindeer herd and found that an extreme winter probably pushed the stressed animals to their deaths.</p>
<p>Born in Florida and raised in New Mexico, Matthew Sturm somehow became an expert on snow. During the past 30 years, he has traveled thousands of miles on the substance, counted how many grains it takes to cover a football field to a depth of two feet (1 trillion), and has spent so much time lying on his side and squinting through a hand lens that he swears he has seen molecules of water moving through the snowpack.</p>
<p>Now, he has written and illustrated a children’s book on snow.</p>
<p>One fall day in Interior Alaska, a lion stalked a ground squirrel that stood exposed on a hillside like a foot-long sandwich. The squirrel saw bending blades of grass, squeaked an alarm call, and then dived into its hole. It curled up in a grassy nest. A few months later, for reasons unknown, its heart stopped during hibernation.</p> <p>Twenty thousand years later, Ben Gaglioti is teasing apart the mummified ground squirrel’s cache in an attempt to better reconstruct what Alaska was like during the days of the mammoth, bison, wild horse and camel.</p>
<p>After a few chaotic, free-form weeks in Haiti, an Alaska geologist reported that he and a team of others didn’t find the rips in the ground they were looking for following the early January e
<p>Garbage allows gulls to thrive in the oilfields of northern Alaska, and furry little pikas might be changing their body shapes in response to changes in climate, according to two graduate students
<p>More than a century ago, eight prospectors were panning the glacial sands near Hubbard Glacier when the earth starting shaking and never seemed to stop. A few days later, they had survived a natura
