The HMO has a research staff with specialisation in areas of geomagnetism, atmospheric physics, ionospheric physics, magnetospheric physics and space plasmas.
In collaboration with its national partners (NWU, UKZN, Rhodes, CDSM), the HMO owns and/or operates a wide suite of earth-space observational and monitoring instrumentation which facilitates a research infrastructure platform for earth-space research within these areas.
The HMO is the Regional Warning Center for Space Weather in Africa under the International Space Environment Service (ISES), and is currently developing a Space Weather Operations Center in Hermanus.
The HMO operates a suite of earth-space infrastructure on the South Atlantic Islands and in Antarctica for monitoring Space Weather conditions over these areas. In particular, the flagship Antarctic project is the SuperDARN HF radar that is part of a large international collaboration.
The HMO offers technological and innovative services to the public and commercial clients in the defence and aerospace sectors. State-of-the-art equipment and infrastructure for these services include a non-magnetic climatic chamber, a large (2.5 m) three axis Helmholtz coil, a magnetic shielding chamber, an HMO invented magnetic test bench, DQ declinometers and two 4T30 theodolites.
A key goal of the HMO is human capacity development in the earth space science area. This is accomplished through training schools for space physics, supervision of postgraduate students, and lecturing at Universities that have space science programmes.
HMO aims towards the development of human capacity in earth-space science and the creation of a pool of South Africans with transferable skills in electronics, radar technology, instrumentation and measurement, signal processing, software development and data management.
HMO aims to advance science literacy in general and earth-space science literacy in particular among learners, educators, young people, the general public and policy-makers.