Special Talk
Of polar bears and enchanting Northern Lights – a dark winter sojourn in the world’s northernmost year-round research station
Speaker: Girish B. S. (Electronics Engineering Group,RRI)
Since 2008, India has been operating its permanent research station in the Arctic named Himadri, mostly hosting scientists during the summer months (April to October). Towards the end of last year, India launched its maiden winter (November to March) mission to the Arctic. With this epochal expedition, India has become only the fourth country in the world to have a year-round presence in the Arctic, after Norway, Germany, and Italy. RRI, along with three other Indian institutes, participated in this historic first-ever winter Arctic expedition to conduct experiments spanning astronomy, climate change, and atmospheric science in the Arctic region. RRI’s Shaped Antenna measurement of the background RAdio Spectrum (SARAS) experiment is an ongoing experiment designed for precision measurements of the faint cosmological signal from hydrogen, emerging from the era when the first stars and galaxies formed in the Universe (the Cosmic Dawn). However, detecting such a faint signal is daunting as the signal is overwhelmed by several orders of magnitude brighter emissions from our own galaxy, emissions from the ionosphere, and strong interference from terrestrial human-made sources like FM and TV stations. With rapid urbanization, it is increasingly becoming difficult to find suitable radio-quiet sites for deploying SARAS. In the darkness of the Polar Night, I spent nearly a month in Ny-Ålesund - an International Arctic Research base in the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard - aiming to characterize the radio frequency environment around the Himadri station. Such a survey will inform us about the radio quietness of the remote Svalbard location for carrying out cosmology night sky observations using the SARAS radiometer. In this talk, I will describe (with pictures and anecdotes) life during the Polar Night in the world's northernmost permanent research station and how it is a testament to human resilience, adaptations, and survival strategies. I will conclude with a quick summary of the radio frequency interference scenario and our plans for the future.