HAARP, the most powerful ionosphere heater on Earth

Todd Pedersen

Citation: Physics Today 68, 12, 72 (2015); doi: 10.1063/PT.3.3032

View online: https://doi.org/10.1063/PT.3.3032
View Table of Contents: https://physicstoday.scitation.org/toc/pto/68/12
Published by the American Institute of Physics

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quick study

HAARP, the most powerful

ionosphere heater on Earth
Todd Pedersen Its powerful radio waves drive ionospheric electrons back
and forth in what are called plasma waves. As those driven
When stimulated with high-intensity radio electrons collide with each other and with background
species, their temperature goes up, which is why HAARP is
waves, the ionosphere responds with called a heater.
baffling and beautiful displays.
A series of unexpected events
Todd Pedersen is a scientist at the Air Force Research Laboratory’s Just as an opera soprano needs to sing at just the right fre-
Space Vehicles Directorate at Kirtland Air Force Base in quency to break a glass, so a heater must target frequencies
Albuquerque, New Mexico. that match the natural plasma resonances in the ionosphere.

O
Primary targets include the plasma frequency, a function of
ur modern world of Wi-Fi, smartphones, and electron density; multiples of the cyclotron frequency of elec-
location apps relies on radio waves to link up trons spiraling around the magnetic field; and hybrid reso-
all our gadgets. Most of us, though, are unaware nances that combine those fundamental frequencies.
that the ionosphere high above Earth affects the Measurements of optical emissions excited by heated
location services in our phones and the direc- electrons yielded HAARP’s first unexpected result. Spotting
tions relayed by the navigation units in our cars. The complex such emissions at all was a feat, inasmuch as 20 years of at-
dynamics of the ionospheric plasma, a gas of electrons and tempts to do so at the EISCAT (European Incoherent Scatter)
ions enveloping our planet, can be studied by research facil- heater in Norway’s Arctic had been unsuccessful; in fact,
ities such as the High Frequency Active Auroral Research Pro- HAARP scientists had been warned that looking for optical
gram (HAARP), located in Alaska. During the past 15 years, emissions would be a waste of time. Nevertheless, images
HAARP has produced many interesting and unexpected re- recording the red 630.0-nm oxygen line revealed a faint blob
sults, perhaps most spectacularly the production of an artifi- turning on and off in sync with the heater; that could only
cial ionospheric plasma generated by radio waves. mean HAARP had heated the electrons and excited the oxy-
gen. The airglow showed an unexpected enhancement well
Atmospheric shrapnel away from the beam center, at the magnetic zenith—that is,
The ionosphere is the region of the upper atmosphere char- the direction of the magnetic field. The obvious next step was
acterized by a large population of free electrons and ions— to point the beam toward the magnetic zenith, which at
the atmospheric shrapnel that arises when UV photons from HAARP is about 15° south-southwest of vertical. When the
the Sun knock electrons from atmospheric gas. (For a tour of experiment was finally performed in 2002, as the HAARP
the upper atmosphere, see the Quick Study by John Emmert, array swung the beam through the magnetic zenith, the blob
PHYSICS TODAY, December 2008, page 70.) Its density is con- lit up and was 10 times as bright as airglow in any other lo-
trolled by the relative rates of ion production and the recom- cation. A variation of that magnetic zenith effect had been
bination of ions with electrons to re-create neutral molecules. previously observed at EISCAT, but neither the EISCAT nor
The ionosphere begins at an altitude of about 70 km, reaches HAARP version of the effect had been predicted and neither
a peak daytime density of something like a million particles is fully understood.
per cubic centimeter near 250 km, and tapers off above that Thanks to its frequency agility, the HAARP antenna can
altitude to blend into the much more rarefied plasmasphere, heat the ionosphere at specific altitudes where the transmis-
magnetosphere, and solar wind. sion frequency simultaneously matches two resonances. In
The ionospheric plasma can distort and delay satellite 2004, experiments exploiting that possibility produced
communications and navigation signals passing through it; green-line oxygen emissions at 557.7 nm. (The figure shows
indeed, the primary practical motivation for studying the ion- an airglow with red and green oxygen emission.) Those lines
osphere is to get a handle on those effects. At the low power come from an excited state with an energy 4 eV above the
of day-to-day devices, the ionospheric plasma can alter radio ground-state energy; evidently, by “surfing” plasma waves,
waves, but the plasma itself is unaffected. At high enough the electrons accelerated to energies well beyond the thermal
power densities, however, radio waves can affect the plasma energy. Another HAARP experiment in the same series
and generate feedback between the waves and plasma, a phe- heated an ephemeral ionospheric layer produced by an
nomenon that offers a unique means—so-called ionospheric aurora; the resulting green spots were as bright as the aurora
heating—of studying the ionosphere. itself. Those extremely bright spots have since been repro-
The HAARP facility began operating in 1999 with a 6 × 8 duced but are not yet explained.
array of transmitting antennas that, in total, produced 960 kW In 2007 HAARP expanded to its full design capability of
of RF power—about the same as generated by 10 AM radio 12 × 15 antennas and 3.6 MW of total power. During its first
stations. (The figure shows today’s 12 × 15 array.) The HAARP postexpansion science campaign, in February 2008, my col-
beam is broad like a flashlight’s, not narrow like a laser’s, leagues and I obtained optical images with strange, unpre-
but it can be electronically steered anywhere within 30° of dicted rings around the airglow spot. We hypothesized that
zenith—that is, local vertical—and it can operate at 3–10 MHz. if the plasma in the center of the beam were slightly enhanced

72 December 2015 Physics Today www.physicstoday.org

 Heating and observing the ionosphere. Generators at the High Frequency
Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP) operations center in Alaska
(buildings to the upper left) feed power to the large antenna array to the right.
That array, in turn, transmits RF waves that interact with the ionosphere.
Shelters down the road from the array house optical instruments for observing the resulting excitations; one of the instruments is
visible through the clear dome in the lower inset. (Backdrop photo by A. Lee Snyder; inset photo by Robert Esposito.) The red and
green regions in the upper inset (courtesy of Jeffrey Holmes) represent regions of the ionosphere in which oxygen atoms excited by
ionospheric heating relax to lower-energy states. Behind the HAARP site rises Mount Drum.

in density relative to the background ionosphere, the density complex equations describing plasma waves imply a whole
gradient could divert rays away from the center of the beam zoo of wave modes that could potentially be excited by a
toward the location where the ring was observed. Careful ex- transmitter.
amination of echoes from radio waves bounced off the iono- But no one can predict with certainty whether a partic-
sphere turned up evidence for a density-enhancing artificial ular wave mode will absorb half the transmitted energy or
plasma layer just below the natural ionosphere. Moreover, only one part in a million. For example, observed artificial
simulations of RF waves propagating through the observed plasma production accounts for only about 5% of the energy
layer put additional power right where the rings were seen. available from the beam; some of the remaining 95% un-
We had not expected such artificial ionization to be pos- doubtedly excites other modes that might mislead researchers
sible, but we followed up with new experiments designed into wrongly identifying the cause of the ionization. Stimu-
to optimize ionization production. In March 2009, just over lated electromagnetic emissions hold the greatest promise for
10 years after we were told that looking for airglow was futile, helping scientists determine which wave modes are active
I stepped outside with a couple of coworkers during an ion- during actual experiments.
ization experiment and marveled at the light—visible with An interesting and still unexplored aspect of artificial
unaided eyes—from an artificial ionospheric plasma produced ionization is the complex interplay between the plasma cre-
and sustained by radio waves transmitted from the ground. ated by radio waves and the bending or reflecting of radio
In addition to generating unexpected phenomena, waves by that plasma. As food for thought, have a look at the
HAARP scientists used and further developed a diagnostic video that accompanies the online version of this Quick Study.
technique pioneered at EISCAT: stimulated electromagnetic You’ll see a wide range of spots, turbulence, and sharp gra-
emissions. The effect arises when plasma waves stimulated dients—despite the smoothly varying beam. If we are ever to
by the heater regenerate radio waves that are received on the develop practical applications of heating technology, we’ll
ground as a complex spectrum of narrow peaks and broad need to find mathematical solutions describing the evidently
bumps on either side of the transmission frequency. Some of complex feedback process.
those depend not only on electron density but also on ion In August 2015 the HAARP facility was transferred from
mass, magnetic field strength, or other parameters. Thus the the US Air Force to the University of Alaska so that HAARP
stimulated emissions provide a potentially powerful tool for scientists could continue their investigations of fundamental
analyzing conditions in the heated volume. plasma physics in an academic environment.

A zoo of plasma waves Additional resources

Admittedly, research at HAARP has not directly contributed ‣ F. F. Chen, Introduction to Plasma Physics and Controlled
to new corrections for ionospheric effects on navigation or Fusion, Volume 1: Plasma Physics, 2nd ed., Springer (2006).
communications systems. Instead, the many surprises en- ‣ B. Freeman, “HAARP scientists create mini ionosphere,”
countered in HAARP experiments have made abundantly Armed with Science blog (27 February 2010).
clear the need for quantitative predictive theory and model- ‣ N. Rozell, “HAARP again open for business,” University
ing in the field of high-power RF-wave propagation. The of Alaska Fairbanks online news story (3 September 2015). ■

www.physicstoday.org December 2015 Physics Today 73