Modern heating facility for research into the mid-latitude ionosphere

Abstract

The development of new devices for research in physics of the upper atmosphere and near-Earth space, which can be used to carry out controlled experiments on the modification of the ionosphere by powerful short-wave radiation, is an urgent task of modern solar-terrestrial physics, space weather, operation of satellite constellations in near-Earth space, radio communications, and radar. The paper describes a modern heating facility, created within the framework of the National Heliogeophysical Complex of the Russian Academy of Sciences. We review the tasks facing the heater, discuss its main technical characteristics, and describe the capability of the observational infrastructure surrounding the heating facility. The paper justifies the long-term benefits of the development of a heating facility at middle latitudes of Eastern Siberia, which can radiate in a frequency range 2.5–6.0 MHz with an effective power of the order of several hundred megawatts. It is important that the heater will be surrounded by such multifunctional instruments as the modern incoherent scatter radar, mesostratospheric lidar, observational systems that can provide a wide range of possibilities for diagnosing artificial plasma disturbances and artificial airglow structures.