More eyes on the skies

Looking up into space from four sites in Scandinavia, huge radar dishes probe the ionosphere – the ionised gas surrounding Earth – far beyond the orbit of the International Space Station. Ambitious plans are now afoot for the next generation radar, ‘EISCAT-3D’, which will look rather different.

EISCAT (European Incoherent SCATter) radars beam pulses of radio waves into space and detect the echoes. Built in the late 1970s, the radar have helped European scientists understand the aurorae, the magnetosphere, and to monitor micrometeorites and space debris orbiting the Earth.

Unlike the traditional dish-antennas, EISCAT-3D will comprise several fields of small antennas scattered across northern Scandinavia. By collecting radio echoes over a wider area, the new system will be able to operate at a lower frequency and investigate different ionospheric processes. It will operate faster and detect weaker effects in more detail, and has the added advantage that there are no moving parts – a boon in Arctic conditions.

EISCAT-3D will require a vast amount of signal processing, covering thousands of antennas simultaneously, and will produce massive amounts of data. The design process began in 2005 and continues to 2009. Depending on funding for construction, the new system could produce its first data by 2012.