We’re about to head of on the fourth and final deployment of the NASA ATom mission, around-the-world research flights to understand the remote atmosphere. There are four deployments as we want to see how things vary season-to-seaon.
For me the biggest change this time around was that might lab and flight partner, Agnieszka (Aga) moved back to Austria earlier this year. She’ll still be flying half of this mission (we always fly half each as it’s a lot of flights and jet-lag for just one person), but couldn’t be here to pack up, integrate and do test flights. It’s been a good test for me, to see that I can do it on my own, but I’ve missed her as that person to bounce ideas off, that second pair of hands for putting things together and moving boxes, that other person who is equally invested in our measurements and, just as a friend. Before she left another colleague of ours made her this amazing leaving cake, showing the ATom flight path around the world!
Despite Aga’s departure, we did a major revamp of our flight rack to accommodate a new instrument to directly measure the optical properties of aerosols (how much light the scatter and absorb), and got it all packed up and shipped off to the NASA Armstrong base in California.
Frank, the engineer in our lab, came with me to Armstrong to help integrate the rack onto the plane and do tests to make sure all instruments had survived the truck journey without damage.
We’re all set for another set of round-the-word flights, and the last deployment of the ATom mission!