the last truck stop on the data highway

Hi again

Like I promised, there will again be some diary-style short stories posted about my travels and work in the Polar regions. Now, I have just returned to Longyearbyen, Svalbard, where part of my PhD work and a large part of my tourist guide experience originates.

Svalbard is an Arctic archipelago under Norwegian administration and has long been an adventurous outpost-like settlement where coal mining, whaling, fishing, and to some extent hunting and trapping have sustained small populations in up to four larger settlements as well as smaller stations and cabins throughout the area of some 60.000 sq km. For more info, visit the CIA ;-)

CIA - The World Factbook -- Svalbard

But, finally, the world has reached out and has now connected itself with even the last miner and trapper, whether they want it or not. A brand-new glass fibre cable connection from the Norwegian mainland now brings Gigabit data transfer capabilities (at least theoretically) right up to 78 °N.

Actually, the growing scientific community on the main island, Spitsbergen, has been in dire need of such a stable line with some significant bandwidth, especially since there is a satellite downlink station located just outside the main settlement, Longyearbyen, where I stay right now. Previously all data and communications connections to the mainland had been satellite-based as well, which was kind of absurd for the downlink station...

Check out the link to the station:

SvalSat-Svalbard Satellite Station Nowegian Space Centre

Even the northernmost community on Svalbard, Ny-Ålesund, also a former mining town which now markets itself as an "International Research Platform" is by now connected by an upgraded direct-beam radio link from Longyearbyen and should be getting something like 155 MBit/s of data through.

Ny-Ålesund LSF - General information about Ny-Ålesund

But there are even more exciting things down the pipeline in this area: the Russians, which by the way also support a good-sized coal mining settlement not far from Longyearbyen, have previously been the suspects of (real or imagined?) cold-war style scenarios, combining secret bases, transport helicopters that could be refitted with their original weaponry in a flash (?!), nuclear subs sneaking along the ice-covered coasts, etc. You get the idea.

But hey, now even these (admittedly still pretty scary) subs can be put to a 'good' purpose: one of them is scheduled to launch a refitted ballistic missile carrying a prototype of a solar-sail-powered spacecraft, er, next tuesday from somewhere in the Barents Sea (i.e. our "backyard").

Let's hope the thing takes off as scheduled and delivers its cargo to a nice orbit altitude (the last attempt seems to have - ehm - crashed in Kamtchatka). Here is the full story:

Wired News: Cosmos 1 Set to Test Solar Sail

And, by the way, let's hope they fire the right rocket, huh ?-)