Rankin Inlet (Jan 22/07) - Scientists are trying to crack a key mystery of one of the North's icons and Jake Punshon of Rankin Inlet is helping them out.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the Canadian Space Agency (CSA) are conducting a joint project examining what causes the northern lights to seemingly dance and flare in the night sky.

A fisheye view shows the THEMIS ground-based observatory near Rankin Inlet. Jake Punshon of Rankin is minding the station and sending hard drives full of photos of the northern lights back to scientists in California. - photo courtesy of Mikko Syrjaesuo/University of Calgary

A University of Saskatchewan researcher asked Punshon, an airport worker, if he was interested in getting involved in the project.

"When he first asked me I thought he was looking for someone to clean the floors and empty the garbage," Punshon said.

The project studies the substorms through a network of five satellites and 20 ground-based observatories scattered throughout Alaska and the Canadian Arctic. Nunavut hosts two stations, one in Rankin Inlet and one in Sanikiluaq.

The stations use high-powered cameras to take pictures of the entire night sky every three seconds, said Mike Greffen, the site deployment manager for the CSA's share of the project. The cameras send low-resolution versions back the project's headquarters at the University of California at Berkeley. High resolution versions of the photos are stored on an external hard-drive on-site.

Punshon's job is to look after general maintenance and take care of any malfunctions that crop up. Every six to eight months, he also has to pick up a hard drive full of roughly three million photos, send it off to researchers in Berkeley, California, and install a new one.

But with computers stored outside in "a railcar on the tundra" there are plenty of things that can go wrong. Last week the California researchers found radio interference was causing feedback on some of the images the station was recording.

For Punshon, that meant a trip out to the site in temperatures that were dipping below -40 C. The high-tech camera is heavy and awkward, and Punshon said he was out there for more than three hours.

"It was kind of like what I imagine working in space would be like because you're wearing a big parka and you've got these big gloves and you're breathing hard and everything's all foggy," he said. "You don't want to drop anything, so you're being very methodical."

The northern lights phenomenon is technically known as a magnetospheric substorm.

"The sun blows solar winds, which are charged particles, at the Earth," Greffen explained. "That interacts with the magnetic field of the Earth and causes an energy buildup...and then that releases about every four hours."

That release causes sudden brightening of the northern lights.

This scientific study has been dubbed THEMIS (Time History of Events and Macroscale Interactions during Substorms) by NASA. The ground-based observatories will be augmented with a network of five satellites to be launched in mid-February, giving scientist their best look yet at the Arctic's most famous light show.

The project has a practical purpose too. The substorms are related to larger space storms that can interfere with spacecraft and satellite communications.