2025 Workshop: New opportunities for sounding rocket ITM studies
Bob McCoy
Bea. Gallardo-Lacourt
Doğacan Ozturk
The most dramatic impacts of space weather and magnetosphere-ionosphere-thermosphere coupling occur at high latitudes, extending from the sub-auroral zone up to the polar cap. As a result, the recent 2024 Decadal Survey highlighted many high priority science objectives and questions relating to these latitudes. Alaska is the only part of the United States from which the observations required for these studies can routinely be made. As a result, a broad range of facilities and instrumentation is already deployed in Alaska, including the PFISR radar, the HAARP facility, and the Poker Flat Research Range (PFRR). The latter two of these are owned and operated by the Geophysical Institute (GI) of the University of Alaska Fairbanks. While PFRR is ideally located for conducting rocket missions to study phenomena occurring within the auroral oval, the GI is now partnering with Alaska Aerospace Corporation (AAC) to expand the options for rocket missions to include studying regions both equatorward and poleward of the auroral oval. AAC operates the state-owned Pacific Spaceport Complex Alaska (PSCA) in Kodiak AK (57.8 N Lat). The new GI/AAC partnership seeks to leverage increasing DoD interest in hypersonic launch to make upgrades to PFRR including the procurement of a portable launch rail and other launch support equipment. At PSCA, AAC has developed a portable Range Safety and Telemetry System (RSTS) which could be deployed across Alaska to support NASA and other sounding rocket missions launched from locations other than PFRR. Potential launch sites include the PSCA in Kodiak and locations further north such as Oliktok Pt on the Arctic Ocean. While PFRR is an ideal location for aurora observations, PSCA provides potential opportunities to study subauroral phenomena including: Sub-Auroral Polarization Streams (SAPS); Sub-Auroral Ion Drifts (SAID); and newly discovered Strong Thermal Emission Velocity Enhancement (STEVE). Depending on the launch vehicle, a sounding rocket launch from northern Alaska may be able to reach the ionospheric footprint of the northern hemisphere magnetospheric cusp. Goals of this workshop are partly to notify the community on these potential new launch locations in Alaska. But the main objective is invite suggestions and discussion relating to new science investigations that might be enabled by these expanded launch possibilities.
The expected increase in options for sounding rocket launch locations in Alaska is not widely known in the CEDAR and GEM communities. While these new options for rocket launch locations are expected to be available shortly, the cost of actually deploying the launch support hardware to a new site may not be justified if it is only done in support of one mission. Thus, a major goal of the workshop will be to host discussion of scientific themes and problems that could be addressed through an extended multi-mission campaign. For example, sub-auroral ITM coupling and physics is of considerable current interest, and could form an ideal theme to be addressed by an extended launch campaign.