Students get to fire the HAARP transmitter at UAF's summer school

At the HAARP research site in Gakona, students will get to do what almost no one outside the facility can: design their own experiments and run them on the array that beams energy into the upper atmosphere. A $199,999 National Science Foundation award to UAF funds the next round, the 2026 Polar Aeronomy and Radio Science summer school.

The point is hands-on training that's otherwise hard to get. Studying the ionosphere, the electrically charged layer of the upper atmosphere that carries radio signals, usually means working with someone else's data. Here, participants develop experiments, clear the safety and operations reviews, and actually run them on HAARP's transmitter alongside its other instruments. The skills feed directly into fields the country cares about: communications, navigation and space-weather resilience.

HAARP is a former military installation now run by UAF's Geophysical Institute, and the summer school puts students on real equipment at a site most people only read conspiracy theories about. The program brought more than 50 researchers to Alaska when it resumed in 2023.