The far tip of Chile is no stranger to one member of the Operation Ice Bridge team. It’s almost home.
Victor Jara Olivares – an electrical engineering doctoral student, graduate research assistant and native of Concepción, Chile – is among the University of Kansas team members who’ll be in Punta Arenas for the NASAs mission.
Jara has been involved in making improvements to the MCoRDS radar and supporting additional radars KU is supplying for the mission. He’s also been integral to the development of another radar to be used by in Antarctica later this season for a National Science Foundation Center for Remote Sensing of Ice Sheets (CReSIS) mission.
As an officer in the Chilean Navy, Jara was involved with the Center for Scientific Studies of the South of Chile and has been to Punta Arenas before. In 2002, while managing a naval air base, Jara helped NASA secure the use of a P3 aircraft.
That exchange put him in touch with Prasad Gogineni, distinguished professor at KU and director of CReSIS, and fostered his interest in remote sensing and polar studies. Freshly armed with master’s degrees in both aerospace engineering and electrical engineering, he was encouraged to pursue a doctorate and was offered a GRA position at KU. It didn’t hurt that his fiancée (now his wife) also was from Kansas.
During Ice Bridge, Jara plans to focus on radar work and forego any family visits. Chile, he points out, is as long as the United States is wide, and the 1,600 hundred-mile drive from Punta Arenas to visit his parents would take days.
We are about to take the DC-8 on its first test flight before Antarctica. The pilots, clipped and professional, have just described the day’s flight plans and the plane is bustling with people making last-minute adjustments.
Suddenly we are ready to go. The city of Palmdale, Calif., drops away as the plane climbs and circles. The dried up lake bed that is home to Dryden and Edwards Air Force Base spreads out below, giving us a Google-Earth view of the area.
We head west over the hills and Los Angeles, indistinct through the haze, and out over the Pacific Ocean. The gravimeter in front of me and Stefan purrs quietly. The aim of the flight is to test and calibrate the laser altimeter – the Laser Vegetation Imaging Sensor (LVIS) – which will measure the surface elevation of the ice sheet.
At 28,000 feet we perform a series of maneuvers to sweep the laser beam back and forth beneath the aircraft. The LVIS engineer is talking to the flight engineer over the intercom while he aligns the instrument. I can hear static, whistles and pops over their voices but nothing that appears to be interfering with our instruments.
To my left an instrument samples the air as we fly along. Melissa, who built the equipment a few days ago, watches pressure gauges and tweaks the dials. Outside, I can see Catalina Island surrounded by clear water. The LVIS engineer announces that he is happy with the laser so we turn for home.
We pass over the smog of L.A., mountains still scarred from the recent forest fires, and the Mojave Desert, where the clear air allows you to see for miles. Back on the ground we head for flight debrief.
Sean downloads the gravity and GPS data that will tell us how well the gravimeter performed. First indications are looking good.
The Gravity Team from the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University on Sunday, Oct. 11 catching the last sun rays outside the NASA hangar a few hours before departing on the DC-8 for Chile. From left: Stefan Elieff (Sander Geophysics), Michael Studinger (Lamont-Doherty), Nick Frearson (Lamont-Doherty), Sean O’Rourke (Sander Geophysics). Photo by Michael Studinger.
Scientists checking their equipment inside the DC-8 before last week’s final science test flight at Dryden. Photo by Nick Frearson (Lamont-Doherty).
From: Steve Cole, Public Affairs Specialist, NASA Headquarters, Washington, D.C.
The last time I was on NASA’s big DC-8 “flying laboratory,” I never got off the ground.
That’s what we do in NASA’s Office of Public Affairs: help get the word out to the press and public about the cutting-edge science, technology, and exploration that U.S. taxpayers sponsor through our civilian space agency. My slice of NASA is the Earth Sciences Division. Although I usually work this beat from behind a desk, once in a while I get to head outside when NASA launches a new Earth-observation spacecraft or takes to the field to do some science.
Now I’m no scientist (English major, thank you), but I’ve been writing about what scientists do for over 20 years. What fascinates me about the whole endeavor is the ingenious ways these men and women find to see things that haven’t been seen before. Who has seen a continent-sized ice sheet change before? I mean, how do you do that? Well, they find a way. It’s an amazing and fun thing to watch.
And with Operation Ice Bridge, I might finally be able to watch scientists doing their work from the air. The DC-8 flight managers tell me there should be enough spare seats for reporters and public affairs types like me to fly along over Antarctica. If that works out, I’ll be sharing the experience with you using the new media tools we now have available: Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, and this blog.
Look for my live reports from Punta Arenas, Chile, starting Oct. 16.
On Wednesday, Sept. 30, engineers, scientists and mission operations personnel gathered around a single computer monitor tucked away in a corner of a building at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. They were waiting for an indication that communication was established between the satellite ground station in Boulder, Colo., and NASA’s Ice, Cloud, and land Elevation Satellite (ICESat) in orbit. Once a connection was made, scientists can “command on” one of the satellite’s lasers and resume the collection of critical ice elevation data.
ICESat has been collecting elevation information of Arctic and Antarctic ice sheets and sea ice since 2003, but it’s uncertain how much longer the satellite’s last of three lasers will operate. So, scientists this fall are using ICESat to calibrate similar measurements from aircraft flights over targets in Antarctica during Operation Ice Bridge. The aircraft campaign will help bridge the data gap until ICESat-II is launched.
As the satellite made a first pass over Antarctica at about 4:15 p.m. EDT, a glitch in communications foiled the first contact. The satellite’s next pass over Antarctica gave ground station managers at University of Colorado’s Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics in Boulder, Colo., enough time to fix the glitch.
At 5:50 p.m., station connection with the satellite was a success and “all commanding was executed as planned,” said David Hancock of Wallops Flight Facility in Wallops Island, Va., instrument manager for the satellite’s GLAS instrument that houses the lasers.
Subsequent passes over Antarctica were also successful. Scientists have started analyzing the science data returned from the first pass, seen in the figure above as a blue line across central Antarctica.
In August, my boss sent me an email with the subject line of “FYI.” I know what he really meant to type was “Great Opportunity.” In the email he asked if I would be willing to travel to the southern tip of Chile to report on the activities of a University of Kansas research team.
As a public information officer for the KU School of Engineering, I work with people who do truly wondrous things that few others outside the school or the field know much about. My job is to ensure more people know the wondrous, seemingly magical, research efforts of our faculty.
This time I’m following the adventures of KU researchers who’ve developed radars and computer models that can tell the world a lot about what’s happening to our polar ice. Not a bad gig. The KU team, housed at the Center for Remote Sensing of Ice Sheets and led by Professor Chris Allen, was selected by NASA to provide much of the instrumentation for Operation Ice Bridge. Also, not a bad gig.
I’ve traveled to most states and visited many Canadian provinces and a few Mexican states, but this is my first trip outside North America. I’m pretty excited about the opportunity to travel to Punta Arenas, so much so that a 29-hour flight itinerary seems like a pretty cool endurance test. I guess it’s good that I like to fly. That finely honed skill will come in handy if I’m able to sit in on a flight over Antarctica in NASA’s DC-8.
My family is pretty pumped about my Chile excursion, too, although we haven’t broken the news to the dog, yet. We think she might be jealous.
Hi there! I’m senior engineer at Columbia University’s Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory in New York, and my role in Operation Ice Bridge is to work with the gravimeter. This instrument can see beneath ice sheets into the water and bedrock below to reveal the hidden shape of this part of the ice sheet – critical information for predicting how ice sheets will change as the climate warms.
I see the importance of the poles as an indicator of change. There you can see how sensitive the environment is and how easy it is to upset its delicate balance. Changes to the ice sheets at the poles will change sea levels and climate around the world.
I have traveled to both poles and like the wildlife, solitude and shear expansiveness of these amazing places that remind me constantly of how fragile life is. I enjoy thinking on my feet and solving problems with limited resources — so different from our normal civilized lives.
On my last trip to Antarctica, we mapped a huge and remote ice-covered mountain range in the middle of the continent, trying to understand how and when the ice sheets formed. Inside my tent I could hear the constant whispering of the wind over the snow, mixed with the music of Radiohead, Coldplay, Snow Patrol, Imogen Heap, among many others.
I miss my friends when I’m away. Two summers ago, I went to Canada’s Ellesmere Island with my good colleague, Michael Studinger, to test gravity instruments near the North Pole. The island is stunning with windswept hillsides leading down to frozen fjords. I walked for miles across the island, observing Musk Ox and wolves go about their lives. Back at camp, I enjoyed listening to other scientists talk about their travels.
I hope that you enjoy reading about our exploits flying over Antarctica as much as I’ll enjoy taking part in them.
The scale and style of Operation Ice Bridge will be a new experience for me. I’ve been involved in airborne research for more than a decade using ice-penetrating radar systems, airborne laser scanning, gravity and magnetics to learn more about the polar ice caps and how they behave.
In previous airborne campaigns we have used small instrumented Twin Otter aircraft and operated out of remote field camps deep in the interior of Antarctica and at high elevations and extreme temperatures. This means living and working in tents for months at temperatures around -20 to -40°F and flying in unpressurized aircraft at high altitude. There are no showers and only limited communications with the outside world in these remote field camps.
The Ice Bridge campaign will be very different from that. We’ll be flying non-stop roundtrips on the large NASA DC-8 from Punta Arenas, Chile. It feels a bit strange to be flying over Antarctica without actually setting foot on the continent and experiencing firsthand the icy cold and breathtaking beauty of the polar landscape. During Ice Bridge we will have to enjoy the fascination of the polar environment from a heated and pressurized aircraft cabin.
I am a research scientist at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in New York. My background is airborne geophysics which I use to study the ice caps and the Earth’s crust in polar regions. For Ice Bridge, I’ll be involved in measuring the Earth’s gravity field to estimate how deep the water is beneath floating glaciers along the Antarctic Peninsula.
I’m looking forward to a relaxed airborne campaign, where you leave from Punta Arenas in the morning and return to civilization in the evening.