News

It's more an engineer's dream than nightmare - to rapidly prototype and redesign aircraft using 3-D printed parts. That's just what a team of student interns and engineers at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California, got to do: custom-build aircraft by repurposing surplus Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). Grafting fuselages side-by-side adds more motors, propellers and batteries to improve power and performance capacity. By lengthening the wings, the team was able to improve aerodynamic efficiency and help extend the flight time of small, lightweight electric aircraft.

NASA is carrying out its sixth consecutive year of Operation IceBridge research flights over Antarctica to study changes in the continent’s ice sheet, glaciers and sea ice. This year’s airborne campaign, which began its first flight Thursday morning, will revisit a section of the Antarctic ice sheet that recently was found to be in irreversible decline.

Data from ARISE will help scientists understand the relationship between ocean and ice surfaces and clouds and the role that relationship plays in the overall climate system. In addition, ARISE data will help researchers further improve methods of interpreting satellite data in the Arctic.

NASA IceBridge scientists conduct GPS-guided ground tests at El Mirage to aid calibration of laser altimeter for precise readings over Antarctica.

High-altitude science aircraft hits milestone on its return to NASA Armstrong Sept. 30 after 10 science flights in NASA's 2014 HS3 mission.

Scientists on NASA's HS3 mission got lucky on September 17 when the remotely piloted Global Hawk dropped a sonde that fell in Hurricane Eduoard's eye and spun all the way down to the surface

A team of researchers from NASA's Langley Research Center recently spent almost three weeks testing the waters — literally — from an airplane as part of a collaborative field campaign called Ship-Aircraft Bio-Optical Research, or SABOR.

MASTER spectrometer image overlaid on a Google Earth photo graphically depicts the fire's boundaries in the visible through thermal infrared spectrum.

NASA released a time-lapse video that highlights three different cameras aboard NASA's remotely piloted Global Hawk aircraft No. 872 as it investigated two tropical systems in the Atlantic Ocean in early September 2014.

NASA’s Cloud Physics Lidar instrument is studying the changing profile of the atmosphere to learn more about how hurricanes form and strengthen.

Over the past few decades, average global temperatures have been on the rise, and this warming is happening two to three times faster in the Arctic.

NASA data and expertise are proving invaluable in California’s ongoing response to the Aug. 24 magnitude 6.0 earthquake in Napa Valley, northeast of San Francisco.

One of NASA's unmanned Global Hawk aircraft number 872 surveyed Tropical Storm Dolly as part of NASA's latest hurricane airborne mission known as the Hurricane and Severe Storm Sentinel, or HS3 mission.

Sophisticated JPL airborne radar system scans earthquake fault displacements in Northern California's Napa Valley after major quake Aug. 24.

The first of two unmanned Global Hawk aircraft landed at NASA's Wallops Flight Facility in Wallops Island, Virginia, on Aug. 27 after surveying Hurricane Cristobal for the first science flight of NASA's latest hurricane airborne mission.

A new NASA field campaign will begin flights over the Arctic this summer to study the effect of sea ice retreat on Arctic climate. The Arctic Radiation IceBridge Sea and Ice Experiment (ARISE) will conduct research flights Aug. 28 through Oct. 1, covering the peak of summer sea ice melt.

Scientists from NASA's Langley Research Center are in California testing new methods for measuring carbon dioxide in Earth's atmosphere.

Never before had NASA flown more than two radar systems, tuned to different frequencies, to measure rainfall from a research aircraft.

New research using data from NASA's Operation IceBridge shows that snow depth on Arctic sea ice has been decreasing over the past several decades, a trend largely owing to later sea ice freeze-up dates in the Arctic.

NASA will fly a series of airborne research campaigns to take a closer look at U.S. air quality, hurricanes forming in the Atlantic, and the impact of climate change on Earth’s polar regions.

Even from 65,000 feet above Earth, aquamarine melt ponds in the Arctic stand out against the white ice sheets and sea ice.

Valerie Casasanto blogs about NASA Armstrong pilots Denis Steele and Tim Williams flying the ER-2 over Alaska while confined in a bulky pressure suit.

The Hurricane Imaging Radiometer, known as HIRAD, will fly aboard one of two unmanned Global Hawk aircraft during NASA's Hurricane Severe Storm Sentinel or HS3 mission from Wallops beginning August 26 through September 29.

NASA embarks on a coordinated ship and aircraft observation campaign off the Atlantic coast of the United States, an effort to advance space-based capabilities for monitoring microscopic plants that form the base of the marine food chain.

NASA’s high-flying laser altimeter begins a campaign to investigate differences between summer and winter sea ice.

Thirty-two undergraduate students are immersed in NASA's Earth Science research during the 2014 Student Airborne Research Program.

The second year of the HyspIRI airborne campaign on the high-altitude ER-2 is gathering data about the health of vegetation in six diverse areas.

During this year's Atlantic hurricane season, NASA is redoubling its efforts to probe the inner workings of hurricanes and tropical storms with two unmanned Global Hawk aircraft flying over storms and two new space-based missions.

Researchers with NASA's Operation IceBridge have completed another successful Arctic field campaign. On May 23, NASA's P-3 research aircraft left Thule Air Base, Greenland, and returned to Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia marking the end of 11 weeks of polar research.