Professor launches a rocket to investigate the northern lights Airplanes that fly over the northern polar region can risk losing radio contact for several hours when the northern lights are at their most active in the skies. In the near future a professor from the University of Oslo will launch a Norwegian rocket to find the explanation for this. The aim is to set up reliable warning routines. Professor Jøran Moen at the Institute of Physics plans to fire a rocket from New Aalesund on the Svalbard archipelago some time between the end of November and beginning of December in order to solve some fundamental physics problems in the atmosphere. One of the problems is why airplanes in the polar region lose radio contact for a relatively long space of time.