Separating Science Fact from Science Fiction
Bill Bristow is not a mad scientist. He's a soft-spoken, intelligent guy who goes home from work every day to a wife, two daughters, three dogs and two cats. Most of the time, he leads a normal, quiet life. Lately, though, he's been spending a lot of time defending his research.
Bristow, a Geophysical Institute assistant professor of electrical engineering, leads the effort to build two sites for studying the ionosphere--the thin air 60 to 500 miles above our heads--at Kodiak and King Salmon. The study areas will be five acres of antenna fields with radar transmitters that will gather information on the ionosphere. Some people are concerned the equipment at the study sites will manipulate the atmosphere to create military mind-control weapons or disrupt aircraft communications.
Dealing with the controversy is part of Bristow's job he never imagined in graduate school. To separate science from science fiction, Bristow explains exactly what the radar fields will do when they're both operational this summer. The translation isn't easy; space physics is largely the study of phenomena people can't see, feel, or otherwise relate to. Even after writing a few hundred science columns, I always ask scientists to explain their space physics projects to me as if I'm a sixth grader. Then I ask them to repeat themselves.
Bristow's project is called SuperDARN, an acronym for "super dual aurora radar network." The antenna fields in Alaska will be part of similar setups in Saskatchewan, Ontario, Labrador, Iceland, Finland, and Antarctica. The goal of SuperDARN researchers around the world is to map the invisible magnetic connection between the sun and Earth, which are partners in creating the aurora.
Earth's magnetosphere, the link between Earth and sun, causes unpredictable problems with satellites and radio transmission and reception. This is one of the practical reasons people who depend on these communication devices want to know more about "space weather."
In Kodiak and King Salmon, Bristow's sites will consist of 20 antennas along with 16 high-frequency transmitters that operate 24 hours a day. The radio signals will travel to the ionosphere and bounce back to receivers at the sites. With the information that comes back, Bristow and others will help create maps of what's happening in the ionosphere. Adding Alaska to the SuperDARN system gives physicists a more complete map.
In letters to local newspapers and at town meetings, a few people in Kodiak and King Salmon expressed concern that SuperDARN might emit radio waves that cause cancer or that SuperDARN will interfere with navigation and radio equipment on passing aircraft. The transmitters for each antenna are the size of a slice of bread, and put out an average of 300 watts of power. Bristow said people can stand right under the antennas while SuperDARN is operating with no ill effects.
"You're spreading 300 watts, the output of three, 100-watt light bulbs, over a very large area," he said. The Federal Aviation Administration and the Federal Communications Commission both reviewed the SuperDARN proposals, and both gave their approval.
Bristow thinks a reason for the concern with his project is that it's funded in part by the Department of Defense, though the vast majority of his funding comes from the National Science Foundation. He said the military is interested in space weather because it affects satellites and high-frequency radio communications. "Everybody I've met is just a person trying to do a job," Bristow said. "Maybe they don't communicate what they're doing, and that's where most of the problems come from."
