We’re off on NASA ATom part three, scanning the atmosphere for gases and particulate matter in our flying lab, a DC-8 aircraft full of scientific instruments. We have two science flights under our belts now. My colleague, Agnieszka, flew to the equator and back from California last Thursday, and then on Sunday I flew from California up to Alaska. This is the beginning of the round-the-world part. From here we’ll fly down the Pacific to New Zealand (with a few stops on the way), round to the bottom of Chile, make a quick out-and-back over the Antarctic, then up the Atlantic to Greenland, and back down to California. All in about 30 days!
The Alaska flight was fairly un-eventful for me. Monitoring instrument performance, getting a first look at data as it comes in and doing some routine tests. On each flight we do as many dips low over the ocean as we have fuel for, to scan the vertical structure of the atmosphere. We did about 6 dips on this flight, and one missed approach (where you go as if to land on a runway, but pull back up at the last minute) at Utqiaġvik in northern Alaska.
We flew up over the Pacific from California, making dips, and then a long high leg over Alaska, to the Arctic Ocean. Here we tried to make a low dip over the ocean. We had some trouble getting in contact with air traffic control and eventually our navigator made contact via another plane, who relayed our messages for us. We hear a little bled-through from the pilot/navigator channel on our headsets in the plane and caught a wonderful snippet that went something like this:
Nav: “This is NASA-817”
Other Plane: “Can you repeat?”
Nav: “NASA-817, November Alpha Sierra Alpha”
OP: “repeat please”
Nav: “NASA, you know, like Apollo, the moon landings …”
OP: “Copy”
Guess it’s not really what you expect to find out over the arctic ocean.
We have down days in each location we stop (1 or 2), to allow for pilots and crew to rest, and scientists to fix anything that comes up with instruments and analyze data. In Anchorage I was in the fortunate position of not having anything to fix on my instruments, so once the data was analyzed I had a little time to explore the beauty of the surrounding area.
