This grant provides fund for the U.S. portion of a collaboration between Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (JHU/APL), British Antarctic Survey (BAS) and the South African National Antarctic Programme to build and operate an over-the- horizon high frequency (HF) auroral radar at the new South African station, Sanae. The project is known as the Southern Hemisphere Auroral Radar Experiment (SHARE). SHARE is essentially identical with the existing Polar Anglo-American Conjugate Experiment (PACE) radar at the BAS station at Halley Bay, Antarctica. When operated together, SHARE and PACE will provide 2-D mapping of plasma flow within their very large overlapping fields of view. Fortunately, they overlap above the U.S. South Pole station as well as much of the area to be instrumented with the new Automatic Geophysical Observatories (AGO's) and, therefore, can provide valuable additional information on the large-scale plasma flows above the observatories. These radars will also complement similar facilities in the Northern Hemisphere and will help to show how the aurora are sometimes the same and sometimes different in these magnetically connected regions. JHU/APL is the world leader in over-the-horizon HF auroral radar.
