As the ER-2 pilot got ready for his first flight out of Fairbanks, I wondered what it’s like piloting the aircraft, all by himself, 65,000 feet up. The NASA ER-2 pilots for this campaign, Tim Williams and Denis Steele, are flying the MABEL instrument to study the glaciers and ice sheets. Before they fly, they […]
The Alaska G-LiHT Campaign is a partnership between scientists and NASA and the U.S. Forest Service (USFS). The design for the research is to link field measurements of forest structure, vegetation composition, and soils with airborne remote sensing data from G-LiHT. At this stage of the mission, the flight planning looks a little like a technicolor version […]
Text by Robert Foster City College of New York – CUNY Here we are ending the 4th full day aboard the R/V Endeavor, and I can hardly believe it! Time really does fly when you’re having fun! Amid the rush of running cables, installing sensors, learning new and exciting science and making new friends, I […]
Text by Doug MortonNASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center I have always enjoyed looking out the window of a plane. From the typical cruising altitude of a commercial jetliner, the view of lakes and fields and mountains is familiar (but still fascinating) to a NASA scientist used to looking at Earth from space. Vegetation and land use follow the […]
Not content with looking at ice from the air, on their day off from flying last week the MABEL and ER-2 team decided to look at ice underground. About a dozen of us went to visit the Permafrost Tunnel Research Facility, a U.S. Army site north of Fairbanks, Alaska, where the crew is based for a summer campaign.
Fly north from Fairbanks and after a while, you’ll be off the map. Literally, as ER-2 pilot Tim Williams found out Thursday when he flew the NASA aircraft on a mission to the North Pole and back. “At some point, the map’s not there,” he said at a post-flight debrief Thursday evening. Williams flew due […]
Text and photos provided by Doug Morton NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center NASA and USDA Forest Service scientists are collaborating on an ambitious project to inventory forest resources in the Tanana Valley of interior Alaska, a region the size of Iowa. The pilot project, funded by the USDA Forest Service Pacific Northwest (PNW) Research Station […]
I didn’t know a hybrid sedan could take a corner that fast. We were sitting in the car, adjacent to the runway where NASA’s ER-2 high-altitude aircraft was about to land. Tim Williams – an ER-2 pilot who will fly later this campaign – was driving, poised to speed down the runway after the plane, […]
Starting July 2014, scientists with NASA’s Ship-Aircraft Bio-Optical Research (SABOR) experiment will make observations from ship and aircraft off the U.S. Atlantic Coast aimed at advancing the technology needed to measure microscopic plankton in the ocean from space. For the next three weeks, follow SABOR researchers as they work toward finding out how and why […]
