4STAR sitting on top of the NASA P3 is watching the sun rise from Africa. It was getting ready for the first of many coordinated flights with the NASA P3 and ER2.
SunSat
ORACLES is now operating in Namibia. 4STAR integrated on the NASA P3 sampled the thick biomass burning aerosol layer over clouds in the South East Atlantic.
We have been working towards a ground based detector standard to help link 4STAR measurements from the air to a stable ground source. This is the 2STAR, Spectrometer for Sun-Tracking Atmospheric Research.
4STAR is ready for ORACLES! It was integrated on board the NASA P-3 in Wallops Flight Facility, amidts a heat wave and large musquitos.
The DC8 parked on the tarmac during the KORUS-AQ mission. This is a great opportunity to compare measurements from our airborne sunphotometer, 4STAR, to that of the ground based sunphotometer, Prede. They are both performing admirably in this hazy environment.
The NASA DC-8 hosts many instruments during the KORUS-AQ field mission to Korea. Here we see the plethora of inlets protruding from the window plates. But none stands as proud as the 4STAR ball in the zenith port, tracking the sun through South Korea's haze.
The first part of NAAMES mission brought us to sample over the North Atlantic in November. Based out of St-John's Newfoundland, Canada, the C130 routinely took flights of 10 hours to the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. It's a view seldom seen from a commercial airliner.
We recently did a trip to Mauna Loa in efforts to calibrate our sunphotometers. Here we see the 4STAR tracking the sun along side its predecessor AATS, and the ground based Prede. The Mauna Loa Observatory (MLO) is chosen for this event because of it's high altitude, and remoteness (middle of the Pacific Ocean).
In preperation for our upcoming field deployments for KORUS-AQ and the second phase of NAAMES, we have been very busy testing and calibrating our instruments. 4STAR and AATS-14 are now ready to be deployed after these roof top tests at NASA Ames Research Center.
A blog post from previous mission:
