News

  • Up, up and away: Launching Balloons in a Blizzard

    Andrew Janiszeski and Troy Zaremba blow up a weather balloon in a dark hotel lobby. The weather was calm last night when they drove into Plymouth, Massachusetts, but this morning a blizzard is raging outside. Snow is piling up in the hotel parking lot, wind gusts are near 70mph, and the power is out – but they have a job to do.

  • NASA Planes Fly into Snowstorms to Study Snowfall

    Scientists repeatedly check the weather forecasts as they prepare aircraft for flight and perform last-minute checks on science instruments. There’s a large winter storm rolling in, but that’s exactly what these storm-chasing scientists are hoping for.

  • Exploring Earth: Student Airborne Researchers fly on NASA’s DC-8

    After a year delay due to the COVID-19 pandemic, 53 students flew on NASA’s DC-8 as part of NASA’s Student Airborne Research Project (SARP).
    Now in its thirteenth year, SARP offers opportunities to undergraduate students from various universities across the United States who are majoring in sciences, mathematics, and engineering to participate in a NASA research campaign.

  • NASA Invites Media to Learn About S-MODE Mission

    NASA held a media teleconference on Friday, Oct. 29 to share information about the Sub-Mesoscale Ocean Dynamics Experiment (S-MODE), a campaign to study small ocean whirlpools, eddies, and currents. Understanding small-scale ocean dynamics will help scientists better understand how Earth’s oceans help slow climate change.

  • Instruments in the Sea and Sky: NASA’s S-MODE Mission Kicks off 1st Deployment

    Using instruments at sea and in the sky, the Sub-Mesoscale Ocean Dynamics Experiment (S-MODE) team aims to understand the role these ocean processes play in vertical transport, the movement of heat, nutrients, oxygen, and carbon from the ocean surface to the deeper ocean layers below. In addition, scientists think these small-scale ocean features play an important role in the exchange of heat and gases between air and sea. Understanding small-scale ocean dynamics will help scientists better understand how Earth’s oceans slow the impact of global warming and impact the Earth climate system.

  • TRACER-AQ research flights are being conducted aboard a Gulfstream V research aircraft flying out of NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston

    NASA Study Examines Houston-area Air Quality Issues

    NASA scientists are in Houston this month for an intensive air quality study exploring the effects of emissions and weather on air pollution, as well as the relationship between air quality and socioeconomic factors.

  • Student Airborne Research Program interns Kristen Gregg of Montana State University in Bozeman, Montana, Brionna Findley of Spelman College in Atlanta, and Jason Beal of Macalester College in Saint Paul, Minnesota.

    Backyard Science: NASA Airborne Science Interns Collect Data from Home

    For more than a decade, dozens of students from across the United States traveled to California to collect air samples aboard NASA research aircraft. Since 2009, about 30 students every year have studied Earth and airborne science as part of the NASA Student Airborne Research Program, or SARP, summer internship. Although COVID-19 restrictions impacted SARP 2020 and lingered in 2021, student interns continued to receive hands-on research experience using Earth and atmospheric science datasets.

  • NASA's DC-8 taking off to St. Croix in support of the Convective Processes Experiment - Aerosols and Winds campaign (CPEX-AW) on Aug 17, 2021. Credits: NASA / Joshua Fisher

    NASA’s DC-8 Deploys to the U.S. Virgin Islands

    NASA’s DC-8 aircraft deploys to St. Croix in the U.S. Virgin Islands on Aug. 17 after more than six months of preparation and instrument upload.

  • NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center ER-2 #809 high-altitude aircraft taking off for Dynamics and Chemistry of the Summer Stratosphere (DCOTSS) science flights in Palmdale, CA on June 17, 2021. Credits: NASA Photo / Carla Thomas

    NASA Mission Explores Intense Summertime Thunderstorms

    NASA and university scientists will be studying the intense summer thunderstorms over the central United States to understand their effects on Earth’s atmosphere and how it contributes to climate change.

  • A view of the MOOSE study region from the Langley C-20B Gulfstream III. On the far side is the city of Windsor in Ontario, Canada. Detroit is in the foreground, with downtown Detroit on the lower left. The Detroit River runs between the two cities. Credits: NASA/Kenny Christian

    NASA Maps Air Quality in Ozone Hot Spot

    Scientists are flying an airborne campaign out of NASA's Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia this month to contribute to a joint U.S.-Canadian study on air quality in a region with high surface ozone levels.

  • A photo of the DLR ATRA aircraft leaving contrails while using alternative fuels. It was taken from a DLR Falcon during the 2015 ECLIF-I research flights. Credits: DLR

    NASA-DLR Study Finds Sustainable Aviation Fuel Can Reduce Contrails

    Cleaner-burning jet fuels made from sustainable sources can produce 50%-70% fewer ice crystal contrails at cruising altitude, reducing aviation’s impact on the environment, according to research conducted by NASA and the German Aerospace Center (DLR).

     

  • NASA’s S-MODE Takes to the Air and Sea to Study Ocean Eddies

    After being delayed over a year due to the pandemic, a NASA field campaign to study the role of small-scale whirlpools and ocean currents in climate change is taking flight and taking to the seas in May 2021.

    Using scientific instruments aboard a self-propelled ocean glider and several airplanes, this first deployment of the Sub-Mesoscale Ocean Dynamics Experiment (S-MODE) mission will deploy its suite of water- and air-borne instruments to ensure that they work together to show what’s happening just below the ocean’s surface. The full-fledged field campaign will begin in October 2021, with the aircraft based out of NASA’s Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California.

    “This campaign in May is largely to compare different ways of measuring ocean surface currents so that we can have confidence in those measurements when we get to the pilot in October,” said Tom Farrar, associate scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts and principal investigator for S-MODE.

    The S-MODE team hopes to learn more about small-scale movements of ocean water such as eddies. These whirlpools span about 6.2 miles or ten kilometers, slowly moving ocean water in a swirling pattern. Scientists think that these eddies play an important role in moving heat from the surface to the ocean layers below, and vice versa. In addition, the eddies may play a role in the exchange of heat, gases and nutrients between the ocean and Earth’s atmosphere. Understanding these small-scale eddies will help scientists better understand how Earth’s oceans slow down global climate change.

  • S-MODE Conducts Field Campaign in Southern California

    After a 13-month delay to the start of science operations due to COVID-19, the Submesoscale Ocean Dynamics and Vertical Transport Experiment (S-MODE) investigation has officially started collecting data with a short field campaign that began on May 3. This campaign features flights based at the NASA Armstrong Flight Research Center (AFRC) main campus in Edwards, CA on the AFRC B200, a deployment of instrumented ocean Wave Gliders from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography (SIO) that look at currents at depth and other environmental conditions, and a Twin Otter International (TOI) aircraft. The B200 is equipped with the JPL Doppler Scatterometry instrument (DopplerScatt) that measures ocean surface velocity and wind, and UCLA’s Multiscale Observing System of the Ocean Surface (MOSES) that measures sea surface temperature (SST). The TOI Twin Otter carries the SIO Modular Aerial Sensing System (MASS), which measures sea surface topography, SST, ocean color, and ocean surface waves.
     
    The week of May 3 marked a number of long-awaited firsts for S-MODE. On Monday, the first flight on the B200 with the combined payload of the JPL DopplerScatt and UCLA MOSES instruments flew lines between Catalina and San Clemente islands — an area of strong ocean currents. The research activities on Friday, centered at  Office of Naval Research experiment site about 350 km offshore of Los Angeles, allowed the science team to conduct joint operations for the first time among the four instruments listed above. This combination of instruments represents some of the key measurements that will be made during future S-MODE campaigns. Demonstrating successful joint operations among these platforms is a key milestone for the S-MODE investigation, and the science team is very pleased with the resulting data so far.
     
    The current experiment will continue until May 18 in preparation for the S-MODE October Pilot campaign, whose flight operations will be based at NASA Ames Research Center.

    S-MODE is supported by the Earth System Science Pathfinder (ESSP) Program Office at NASA Langley Research Center through the Earth Venture Suborbital-3 program and managed by the Earth Science Project Office (ESPO) at NASA Ames Research Center.

    Picture:  Pilots Jim Less (NASA AFRC) and Mike Stewart (NASA ARC) and instrument investigators Jeroen Molemaker (UCLA) and Federica Polverari (JPL) before takeoff of RF4 on May 7, 2021. (Photo J. Piotrowski, AFRC)

  • DCOTSS Teams Begin Integration

    Teams supporting the Earth Venture Suborbital-3 project, Dynamics and Chemistry of the Summer Stratosphere (DCOTSS), began integration of instruments onto the ER-2 at AFRC this week in preparation for the July deployment to Salina, Kansas. Earth Science Project Office personnel and three instrument teams (PALMS (Particle Analysis by Laser Mass Spectrometry), POPS (Printed Optical Particle Spectrometer), and MMS (Meteorological Measurement System)) arrived in Palmdale and began work May 3rd. Integration will be completed in June and the first test flight is scheduled for June 9. Caitlin Murphy (ESPO) and Paul Bui (MMS) are pictured here.

  • NASA's Airborne Sensor Facility MASTER wildfire monitoring

    On September 9th, 2020, Bay Area residents woke up to darkness. Acrid smoke blocked out the morning sun. The sky, dense with ash, turned a deep orange hue.

  • Researchers with NASA’s Delta-X mission conduct preliminary field work in coastal Louisiana’s delta region. Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech

    After COVID-19 Delay, Delta-X Field Campaign Begins in Louisiana

    Teams are headed out by land, water, and air to collect data that will be used to forecast land gain and loss in the Mississippi River Delta as a result of sea level rise.

  • Researcher Luke Ziemba checks an instrument on the Falcon prior to a flight. Credits: NASA/David C. Bowman

    ACTIVATE Begins Year Two of Marine Cloud Study

    A NASA airborne study has returned to the field for a second year of science flights to advance the accuracy of short- and long-term climate models.

     

    The Aerosol Cloud meTeorology Interactions oVer the western ATlantic Experiment (ACTIVATE) began the third of six planned flight campaigns — two campaigns each year beginning in 2020 and ending in 2022 — in late January at NASA's Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia.

  • DC-8 lifts off from Air Force Plant 42 in Palmdale, Calif., at sunset. Credits: NASA / Carla Thomas

    NASA’s DC-8 Returns to Flight

    NASA’s DC-8 aircraft returned to the skies after more than a year of maintenance, which included an overhaul to all four engines. NASA operates the highly-modified Douglas DC-8 as a flying science laboratory in support of the agency’s Airborne Science program. On Monday, Jan. 18, the aircraft departed for San Antonio, Texas, where it will remain for planned periodic depot maintenance over several months.

     

     

  • ASP Research Network as tracked by the Mission Tools Suite

    This figure depicts nearly eight years of science flights across the globe by the NASA Airborne Science Program (ASP) aircraft serving the needs of the Earth Science community. Flight tracking is achieved using the Mission Tools Suite (MTS). 

  • A team of NASA researchers traveled to Australia to work with partners supporting a mission to return an asteroid sample to Earth.

    Capturing an Asteroid Sample Return from Down Under

    A team of NASA researchers traveled to Australia to work with partners supporting a mission to return an asteroid sample to Earth. The Scientifically Calibrated In-Flight Imagery (SCIFLI) Hayabusa 2 Airborne Reentry Observation Campaign (SHARC) team successfully imaged the reentry of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) mission Hayabusa 2.

  • The crew after their successful season. In the photo from left to right: Josh Willis, OMG lead scientist; Mike Wood, OMG scientist; Linden Hoover, Kenn Borek co-pilot; Jim Haffey, Kenn Borek pilot; and Ian Fenty, OMG scientist. Not pictured are Gerald Cirtwell, Kenn Borek flight engineer, and Ian McCubbin, OMG project manager. Credit: Josh Willis/JPL

    Pandemic Delays, But Doesn’t Slow, Ice Melt Research in Greenland

    Despite racing against impending harsh weather conditions, a red and white World War II aircraft flew slowly and steadily over the icy waters surrounding Greenland in August and September. Three weeks delayed by pandemic restrictions, scientists from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory inside this retrofitted DC-3 plane started dropping hundreds of probes as part of an annual expedition known as the Oceans Melting Greenland(OMG) Project.

  • Masks are part of the safety protocol for ACTIVATE scientists. Here, Yonghoon Choi prepares for a science flight on the HU-25 Falcon. Credits: NASA/David C. Bowman

    ACTIVATE Makes a Careful Return to Flight

    NASA's Aerosol Cloud Meteorology Interactions Over the Western Atlantic Experiment (ACTIVATE) eased into its second set of 2020 science flights out of NASA's Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia. Barring any threats to the health or safety of the researchers or crew, flights will continue through the end of September

  • NASA's C-20A research aircraft takes off with the UAVSAR instrument attached below during an earlier flight from Edwards Air Force Base near Palmdale, California. Credits: NASA

    NASA Takes Flight to Study California's Wildfire Burn Areas

    While the agency's satellites image the wildfires from space, scientists are flying over burn areas, using smoke-penetrating technology to better understand the damage.

  • Captured by the ASTER instrument aboard NASA's Terra satellite, this false-color map shows the burn area of the River and Carmel fires in Monterey County, California. Vegetation (including crops) is shown in red; the burn area (dark blue/gray) is in the center of the image. Credits: NASA/METI/AIST/Japan Space Systems

    From Space and in the Air, NASA Tracks California's Wildfires

    Earth-observing instruments on satellites and aircraft are mapping the current fires, providing data products to agencies on the ground that are responding to the emergency.

  • The Swift HALE uncrewed aircraft takes off from Spaceport America in New Mexico on July 7, 2020, for its first flight test. Credits: Swift Engineering

    NASA Small Business Partnership Prepares Drone for 30-Day Science Flights

    With the help of NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley, Swift Engineering of San Clemente, California, completed a two-hour flight test of their Swift High-Altitude Long-Endurance (HALE) UAS. The applications of the technology – for science, agriculture, and disaster response – could have a real impact on our everyday lives.

  • SARP intern takes an air sample

    NASA Airborne Science Interns Gathering Data at Home

    Every summer since 2009, the NASA Student Airborne Research Program (SARP) has brought about 30 undergraduate STEM students from across the United States to California for an internship experience with NASA Earth Science research that includes flights on a research aircraft. This year with COVID-19 travel and social distancing restrictions in place, SARP might be grounded but the internship continues with new at-home data collection as well as the analysis of previously collected aircraft, ground and satellite data.

  • Mississippi River Delta, coastal Louisiana. NASA's Delta-X mission seeks to learn how sea-level rise affects the area. Credits: Jaimie Tuchman / Adobe Stock

    NASA Prepares for New Science Flights Above Coastal Louisiana

    Delta-X, a new NASA airborne investigation, is preparing to embark on its first field campaign in the Mississippi River Delta in coastal Louisiana. Beginning in April, the Delta-X science team, led by Principal Investigator Marc Simard of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, will be collecting data by air and by boat to better understand why some parts of the delta are disappearing due to sea-level rise while other parts are not.

  • The image shows a thermokarst lake in Alaska. Thermokarst lakes form in the Arctic when permafrost thaws. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

    NASA Flights Detect Millions of Arctic Methane Hotspots

    The Arctic is one of the fastest warming places on the planet. As temperatures rise, the perpetually frozen layer of soil, called permafrost, begins to thaw, releasing methane and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. These methane emissions can accelerate future warming—but to understand to what extent, we need to know how much methane may be emitted, when and what environmental factors may influence its release.

  • The HU-25 Falcon, pictured here, will fly under and through the clouds, where a suite of instruments will take samples directly from the surrounding air to measure everything from aerosol properties to droplet composition to gas. Instrument probes are visible here protruding from the top of the aircraft. Credits: NASA/David C. Bowman

    Probing the Hazy Mysteries of Marine Clouds

    A new NASA airborne science mission will take researchers on coordinated flights above, through and below the clouds over the western North Atlantic Ocean. The Aerosol Cloud Meteorology Interactions Over the Western Atlantic Experiment (ACTIVATE) is scheduled to begin the first of six flight campaigns this week at NASA's Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia.

  • NASA’s P-3 and ER-2 research planes are studying East Coast snowstorms Jan 17-Mar 1, 2020. Credit: NASA Credits: NASA

    NASA Snow-Chasers Set to Fly Into East Coast Winter Storms

    This month NASA is sending a team of scientists, a host of ground instruments, and two research aircraft to study the inner workings of snowstorms. The Investigation of Microphysics Precipitation for Atlantic Coast-Threatening Snowstorms, or IMPACTS, has its first deployment in a multi-year field campaign from Jan. 17 through March 1. It will be the first comprehensive study of East Coast snowstorms in 30 years.

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