NASA's Gulfstream III aircraft (N992NA) lifts off from U.S. Air Force Plant 42 in Palmdale, Calif., for a flight to its home base at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston following installation of a synthetic aperture radar in an underbelly pod at NASA's Dryden Aircraft Operations Facility.
The Gulfstream III is used to transport astronauts returning from Kazakhstan to Houston, Texas, after completing missions aboard the International Space Station. In 2011-2012, the aircraft was extensively modified to accommodate the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory's P-band Uninhabited Aerial Vehicle Synthetic Aperture Radar (UAVSAR) instrument in a pod below the fuselage. The interior was also modified to include equipment racks and crew stations for the UAVSAR and Platform Precision Autopilot (PPA) operators. The P-band UAVSAR instrument is used to study North American root-zone soil moisture as part of the Airborne Microwave Observatory of Subcanopy and Subsurface (AirMOSS) project. AirMOSS is part of the NASA Earth Venture-1 (EV-1) program.
NASA/DFRC/Tony Landis
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