The Kjell Henriksen Observatory 2013-2023

Fred Sigernes^1,2

¹ The University Centre in Svalbard (UNIS), Norway
² Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), Trondheim, Norway

The activity at the Kjell Henriksen Observatory (KHO) has been high the last decade except for the pandemic year of 2020. Even though the observatory was in full operation, no rocket campaigns were carried out and no visits from our instrumental partners occurred. On the other hand, the situation gave us more time to focus on upgrades, instrumental work, and new constellations. We also managed to keep in contact with our students through Teams or Zoom, and they all finished with their courses and degrees successfully.

In total 32 students have finished their degrees under the supervision of the observatory crew in the last decade. The latter personnel are 5 full-time permanent scientific positions at the Department of Geophysics at UNIS known as the Space group. This group has increased its manpower from 2 to 5 PhD candidates and 2 Post Docs in 2014-2023. In the period 2014 - 2022, the group published 108 scientific publications and gave 124 presentations on conferences. Note that the crew is living in Longyearbyen all year round, contributing to the local society.

KHO serves as the main laboratory for hands on training and teaching of students in the Space physics group at UNIS. The number of courses has increased from 4 to 6 with 45 ECTS (European Credit Transfer and Accumulation System) in 2014 to 75 ECTS of teaching load by 2023. The focus is observational techniques, instrument development and remote sensing of the aurora / airglow.

The number of optical instruments that operates during the auroral winter season from November to the end of February have increased decadal from 25 to 31. 22 different institutions from 10 nations are now present at the observatory. A corresponding increase in non-optical instruments that run all-year-round 24 hours a day is from 10 to 16. In 2022, a boost of 4 new groups joined with two high end interferometers, an all-sky camera, a Near-InfraRed (NIR) camera with spectrograph and a GNSS (Global Navigation Satellite System) test receiver. The instrumental activity is now high.

On the instrumental development side, we are pleased to announce that the SuperDARN radar initially constructed back in 2015, now is up and running again after the total breakdown in 2018 due to heavy weather and icing conditions. Additional supporting steel poles have been put into the ground at each end of the two mast arrays. The masts are now made more sturdy in solid aluminum.

Another highlight is that our knowledge of spectroscopy is transferred out into space. Our hyperspectral prototype design was used onboard NTNUs HYPSO-1 (HYPer-spectral Smallsat for ocean Observation no. 1) that was launched on 13 January 2022 by a SpaceX Falcon-9 rocket from Kennedy Space Center in Florida. It is Norways first scientific satellite. It is one of the smallest of its kind performing ocean spectral mapping with high signal to noise characteristics. Two more satellites are planned with our designs.

Both before and after the COVID-19 pandemic, KHO has been used as the main launch decision site for 10 rocket launches both from mainland Andøya Space Centre and SvalRak in Ny-Ålesund, Svalbard. The extensive armor of optical instruments was used to identify dayside aurora and optimal launch conditions. KHO was an essential partner in the Grand Challenge Initiative-CUSP (2017-2021), which was a successful large-scale international collaboration effort to study by sounding rockets multi-scale physics and charged particle precipitation in the geomagnetic cusp region.