New internet connection for Scott Base

Scientists in Antarctica are about to get a huge upgrade to their internet.

Antarctica New Zealand has installed a Starlink at Scott Base which will boost their internet speeds by a whopping factor of ten!

This means that the scientists at the Ross Island research station will now have similar internet speeds to those in New Zealand. Chief scientific advisor, Jordy Hendrikx, said that this will allow data to be shared and worked on from afar in near real-time.

Before this upgrade, the scientists had to deal with slow connections and reduced bandwidths, which meant they often had to return to New Zealand with the data on hard drives. Can you imagine how frustrating that must have been? But now, with the increased cloud computing capacity, they can update and send information in real-time up to a cloud server, which means collaborators can start working on the data in near real-time too!

This upgrade will improve communication between scientists, staff, and friends & family back home and open up the possibility of remote monitoring. Instruments can now be controlled and data harvested from anywhere in the world!

This Starlink system is not going to replace the existing Internet system – it’s just a secondary backup that provides a much larger pipeline of data. So even if the Starlink system stops working, everything won’t go dark.

The Starlink system was successfully trialed at the end of the summer season and is now open to the base’s 17 staff.