Building on history
The ambitious KiNET-X mission rests on decades of pioneering research
That’s the news we’ve been waiting to hear, folks… (Pause) We’ll be picking up the count at 8:34 with an estimated launch time of 8:44 pm Eastern. There is a possibility that we would hold again at T-minus three minutes. That has not been determined yet, so we just, we’re counting down and crossing fingers that will not have to be the case, but great news for now.
SCIENTISTS HAVE BEEN WORKING on the auroral problem for decades. KiNET-X stands on the shoulders of that earlier research.
One of those scientists whose work underlies this experiment is Hans Nielsen, a UAF professor emeritus who began researching the aurora’s processes in the 1970s. He was also a faculty adviser to Delamere as a UAF graduate student.
Hans Nielsen in his UAF Geophysical Institute office, August 2024. Photo by Bryan Whitten.
The question that KiNET-X is trying to answer is a major one not only in space physics but physics in general, Nielsen said.
“It's out in the formation of stars, out in the universe,” he said. “Understanding how gasses and plasmas interact is a very fundamental problem.”
Nielsen is a noted expert in the field of auroral research and is particularly recognized for his wide-ranging work studying the upper atmosphere and the physics of the aurora, including pulsating aurora. He has published extensively about the aurora in his decades of research and has been involved with numerous barium-release experiments.
Hans Nielsen, right, with Gene Wescott during the Combined Release and Radiation Effects Satellite mission. Photo courtesy of Don Hampton.
He also did optical observations for the Geophysical Institute on a NASA-Defense Department mission to study Earth's radiation belts and the space environment under both natural and artificially induced conditions. The Combined Release and Radiation Effects Satellite , or CRRES, mission launched July 25, 1990, from Cape Canaveral, Florida.
The CRRES program also featured a series of sounding rocket launches and associated observations. These flights were conducted to perform chemical release experiments in the ionosphere and magnetosphere to complement the satellite's observations.
Delamere analyzed that work for his 1998 Ph.D. thesis.
Nielsen was also involved in experiments to try to understand critical ionization velocity. He has authored or co-authored nearly 20 papers on the subject.
Nielsen, who began his time at the Geophysical Institute in 1967, started his aurora work by using television cameras to record the activity. He then turned to the behavioral connection between the northern aurora and the southern aurora.
“We were flying airplanes over Alaska and south of New Zealand to look at how the aurora looked north and south,” he said. “We found that when you had an arc up here, then you had an arc down there, and they were moving synchronously.”
Results from those 1967, 1968 and 1970 flights are detailed in the major 1972 paper , with co-authors Gene Wescott and Neil Davis from the Geophysical Institute and Bob Peterson from Los Alamos National Laboratory, titled “Relative motion of auroral conjugate points during substorms.” Wescott was also a co-investigator on the CRRES experiment.
Top: A portion of the cover page of the research paper about conjugate aurora. Above: An image from the research paper.
Nielsen figures he has been involved in many of the nation’s barium-release launches. Poker Flat Research Range was born out of Defense Department barium-release rocket launches at the new site in 1968.
Nielsen sees the 1999 APEX North Star I experiment, on which Delamere was a postdoctoral researcher, as foundational for KiNET-X. Nielsen, overseeing optical observations, was the Geophysical Institute’s principal investigator for APEX North Star I.
Hans Nielsen photo by Bryan Whitten.
The experiment was led by Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory and the Russian Institute for the Dynamics of the Geospheres.
APEX North Star I was one of four planned suborbital launches in the $8 million APEX program: One each in 1999 and 2001 from Poker Flat Research Range and one each in 2000 and 2002 out of Plesetsk Cosmodrome, south of Archangel in northern Russia. North Star I was the only launch of the four to actually occur.
Those planned launches grew out of an earlier APEX program, which had its only launch in December 1991. That program ran until 1997 and was a U.S.-Russia post-Cold War collaboration to study how artificially injected plasma interacts with Earth's magnetosphere and ionosphere.
That initial APEX program and the separate 1999 U.S.-Russia launch at Poker Flat were facilitated by the U.S. Department of Defense.
Nielsen said it was an experiment 15 years before the 1991 APEX launch, however, that broke open the research into the aurora problem.
A Navy satellite called S3-3, launched in 1976 to primarily gather data about auroral zone phenomena, revealed the existence of an electric field parallel to the magnetic field. The Navy had launched S3-3 to learn more about conditions that could affect military and other communications systems.
Hans Nielsen photo by Bryan Whitten.
Data from S3-3 helped confirm theories regarding the acceleration of charged particles on parallel electric fields, leading to enhanced auroral activity.
“All through the ’70s there were efforts to actually locate this parallel electric field,” Nielsen said. “I think the science community will agree that the key observation was done with the S3-3 satellite.”
A lot has changed between that 1991 APEX launch and the 2021 KiNET-X launch.
“We didn't have the observational capabilities nor the programming modeling capabilities that we have now, so there were a lot of things that we couldn't observe,” Nielsen said.
“That was what was so good with KiNET-X,” he said. “By that time the modeling and the understanding of the basic physics had progressed to a point where we knew what questions to ask, and equally important, we knew we had the capabilities to answer the questions observationally.”
Will scientists ever fully understand what happens at the tiny scale to form the aurora?
“I have to say, yes, eventually we will,” said Nielsen, who in recent years has turned his attention to another phenomenon — sprites, upper atmospheric lightning. “But as in so many scientific endeavors, you start by addressing one problem and get an answer, but in the process 10 other questions turn up.”
Top photo shows Hans Nielsen, second from right, aboard a U.S. research aircraft over northern Canada. Photo courtesy of Don Hampton
