Three rockets will ignite Poker Flat’s 2025 launch season

Three NASA sounding rockets are set to launch from Poker Flat Research Range as early as Tuesday to learn more about three types of aurora — black, flickering and fast-pulsating.

The launch window is Jan. 21 through Feb. 5.

The University of Alaska Fairbanks Geophysical Institute owns Poker Flat, located at Mile 30 Steese Highway, and operates it under a contract with NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility, part of the agency’s Goddard Space Flight Center.

The launches will be the first of the season. As of April 2024, Poker Flat had launched 350 major sounding rockets and about 1,800 meteorological rockets in its 55-year history. 

To receive updates about the launches, text PFRRLAUNCHES to 866-485-7614. Updates and a live feed will be provided on the Poker Flat Facebook page.

Probing the black aurora

The Black and Diffuse Aurora Science Surveyor mission is led by Marilia Samara of Goddard Space Flight Center.

Scientists want to understand the processes that create an optical aurora variation known as the black aurora, the result of a significant decrease in auroral particle precipitation in localized regions. Black auroras are dark and separate structured regions embedded within a larger and faint diffuse aurora. 

“We want to know about the electrons inside regions of black aurora — how many, their energies and in which directions they are moving,” Samara said.

Diffuse aurora are usually not visible to the unaided eye because they are so spread out and faint. Observers in regions with frequent and intense auroras are more likely to see them.

To viewers, black auroras seem to cut out sections of auroral light.  They move with the aurora and sometimes appear to move through the background aurora.

Samara, who focuses on aurora research, is quite familiar with Poker Flat. She last launched a rocket as lead investigator in March 2014 with an experiment aimed at improving understanding of the electron precipitation that creates the aurora. She has served as co-investigator on several other Poker Flat missions, including last year’s Beam-PIE, as well as for ground-based imaging campaigns as a postdoctoral researcher.  

Samara’s doctoral thesis at Dartmouth College focused on electromagnetic waves created inside the aurora and used data from several NASA rockets launched at Poker Flat.

A double shot for aurora answers

The Ground Imaging to Rocket investigation of Auroral Fast Features mission consists of two rockets and aims to study the fastest observable auroral variations: the flickering aurora and the fast-pulsating aurora. The two are similar but have notable differences.

“Flickering has very regular periodicities, while fast-pulsating contains fairly random modulations,” said principal investigator Robert Michell, also with Goddard Space Flight Center.

“They are caused by electromagnetic waves interacting with electron distributions in space, scattering the electrons,” he said. “They are caused by different types of waves in different regions of space.”

The mission aims to learn about the wave-particle interactions.

Michell is also familiar with Poker Flat and was a co-investigator on Samara’s 2014 launch. He has supported many missions over the last 20 years, starting with the 2005 CASCADES mission to study plasma processes associated with the aurora. He was the lead graduate student from Dartmouth College.

The motor failure on the CASCADES mission is what led Michell into using ground-based optical imaging and radar observations to study the same plasma processes the rocket was targeting. As a result, Michell has conducted extensive ground-based auroral imaging and incoherent scatter radar campaigns from Poker Flat.

•••

Other agencies and institutions involved in the two missions include the Air Force Academy; UAF; Dartmouth College; University of California, Berkeley; University of Maryland; and Catholic University.  

UAF participants in the two missions include professor Peter Delamere of the Geophysical Institute and College of Natural Science and Mathematics, Poker Flat chief scientist Don Hampton, Professor Emeritus Hans Nielsen and research professor Paul Bernhardt.

NASA will use two-stage Black Brant IX rockets for both missions. The 40-foot rockets can reach altitudes of more than 200 miles, making them ideal for studying auroras, solar physics and the upper atmosphere. 

Optical auroral observations for both missions will be made at a Geophysical Institute observing site in Venetie, on the Teedriinjik (formerly Chandalar) River north of the Arctic Circle.

In addition to launching sounding rockets, Poker Flat is home to several scientific instruments designed to study the atmosphere and ionosphere. Poker Flat is the world’s only scientific rocket launching facility owned by a university.

Poker Flat will also be the site of a three-rocket launch in late March. That mission, led by UAF professor Mark Conde, will study the density, wind and composition perturbations that occur in Earth’s far upper atmosphere during auroral substorms.