NASA researchers spend weeks, even months at a time
in remote locations around the world
collecting critical data about Earth's environment.
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Many studies are done from the air using NASA's fleet of research aircraft.
One such mission is Operation IceBridge, a multi-year study of polar ice
conducted by the NASA Airborne Science Program.
IceBridge sends NASA's P-3 flying laboratory to Greenland and Alaska
in the Spring to study changing ice conditions in the Arctic.
A second aircraft, the NASA DC-8, flies from Punta Arenas, in southern Chile
in the fall, to measure land and sea ice over Antarctica.
It takes months of planning to execute a major international mission like IceBridge.
Diplomatic clearances, configuring the aircraft with scientific instruments,
and finding facilities that can support the people and the airplane itself
are just some of the preparations needed for IceBridge
to meet its mission requirements and goals.
Frank Cutler: To deploy to someplace like Chile, we plan a good six months
before the mission to bring everything together so that once we arrive here,
we're ready to execute missions on a daily basis.
Walter Klein: Typically a mission director, a mission manager, a program manager,
we get called different names, we'll do the site surveys for the location,
we're liasoning with the government, of the, the host government,
to the host airport, that's the real legwork that's done prior,
is coming out and making sure that they can house and feed us
and take care of the people, the hotels. You name it,
there's a lot of little tiny details that can't be overstated.
Bill Brockett: The biggest logistical challenge for the project as a whole
is to set up all of the lab space and the facilities so that the scientists
can process their data and make their decisions about which project.
Frank Cutler: Logistics is huge for something like this because we have to make sure
we can all support the people in the field as well as the aircraft.
So we think a lot about aircraft spares, and then little details
about the support equipment for the airplane.
Matthew Berry: Usually on every deployment we're going somewhere,
there's at least a group that goes out and scopes it out.
A lot of it's done while we're working other missions. And they will talk with the airfield,
set up and tell them what we're going to be doing.
And then as they're communicating back with us with what capabilities
the airfield has to support us, that way we know what to ship.
Narrator: For a deployment more than 6,000 miles away in the southern hemisphere,
the maintenance crew needs to carry an extensive payload
to maintain the DC-8 on site, and keep the mission on schedule.
Mechanic: Yeah, we can put them right on the side there.
Narrator: More than thirteen thousand pounds of cargo are packed on the DC-8.
Everything from spare tires, parts and tools, to basic comforts of home
for the near daily 11-hour research flights over Antarctica.
Bill Brockett: On a deployment like this we bring the equipment with us.
And we also ship a lot of other things by sea in a big container
so that we can keep the airplane moving. It'll come back from a mission.
If there's anything wrong that needs to be repaired before the next flight,
we have the maintenance crew to support it during the night
and get it ready for a mission the following day.
(Engine starts)
Narrator: The DC-8 flight operations team works around the clock
to support Operation IceBridge, providing ground support for take-offs and landings,
operating the plane on research flights, and making sure
sensitive science instruments stay powered up and heated overnight.
The airfield is staffed 24 hours a day.
Frank Cutler: We have a make-up of about twenty-eight people supporting the
flight operations down here. And that consists of the
the pilots, flight engineers, navigators, mission directors,
and then the maintenance crew that's split between mechanics and avionics technicians.
Narrator: The maintenance team often works on tight deadlines
to prepare the aircraft for its next deployment.
Just ten days after removing one set of science instruments from a previous mission,
the DC-8 is reconfigured for IceBridge.
In three weeks time, the plane is transformed into a working science laboratory,
with a suite of radar and laser instruments and cameras installed
throughout the cabin, cargo pit and fuselage.
Frank Cutler: Yeah, the unique thing about the DC-8 is that it was modified to accept,
at this point, we've got about one-hundred different instruments
that have been integrated into this airframe. And so part of the modifications
that were done early on was to make the airplane as versatile as possible.
So if you were to look through the airframe you'd see cut-outs in both the bottom
of the aircraft and the upper side of the aircraft.
And a number of the windows were modified to carry structural loads
of instruments being installed as well. So we can look in pretty much every direction
there is outside this airplane as we're traveling through the sky.
Narrator: Once the science instruments are installed, the flight operations team
conducts a series of ground checks and instrument test flights
over the California desert to make sure the DC-8 is mission ready.
Experimenter: Looks like maybe it's level now?
Mission Director: Right, looks like it's wings level and we're on course.
Michael Studinger: So the reason why we picked these sites over the desert in
California is because they have these dry lakebeds there.
And they're a very flat area that's ideally suited for our purpose.
So we can put a GPS receiver on a car and kind of drive around on these flat lakebeds,
measure them. And then a few days later fly over the same area with the DC-8
and take a measurement from the air, compare the two measurements and use the data
from the ground to calibrate and validate the airborne measurements.
Narrator: While the aircraft is prepared for the trip to Chile, the science and flight
operations teams are required to undergo specialized safety training, regardless of if
they've flown on the DC-8 in the past.
Philip Wellner: Well, for the DC-8, everybody who flies has to go through,
basically, a safety briefing. We go into a little bit more detail
because we do more things on our airplanes than commercial airliners do.
From our pilots, they go through survival training, water and land, and depending
on where they're going, some of them have been through Arctic.
All of our crew members, they all have to go through altitude chamber,
water survival, land survival. And what we do here is we just build on that
and try and bring anybody else that hasn't had any formal training up to speed
so they at least have a working knowledge of the kind of conditions
that can happen if something was to go wrong with the aircraft.
Narrator: Safety equipment tailored for IceBridge is also packed on the DC-8.
Philip Wellner: Overhead compartments we've got twenty man life rafts,
there's four of those onboard the aircraft.
We have two, what we call global survival kits,
which has different survival items inside of there.
For this particular deployment, we also have anti-exposure suits, which,
if they were to go into the water, we'd have enough for everybody
onboard the aircraft for that.
Narrator: Once the aircraft and passengers are cleared to fly,
it's time to pack up for the long transit flight from Armstrong Flight Research Center
in California, to the southern tip of Chile.
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(Aircraft engine revs)
(Aircraft cabin noise)
Narrator: The exhausted team gets an opportunity to rest
on the overnight journey to Santiago, where a second flight crew is on standby
to complete the journey to Punta Arenas.
Frank Cutler: To get to this part of the globe, it's about fourteen hours of flying.
We had pre-deployed a crew to Santiago to join the flight at that point, so that the
crew that flew all night could then step out of the cockpit and rest. And that allowed
us to continue that next day down to Punta Arenas, Chile
without having to stop overnight.
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(Wind)
Narrator: It's a cold and windy welcome at the Punta Arenas airport,
the mission base for Operation IceBridge. The scientists and flight crew
will call this place home until the end of November.
Michael Studinger: We are setting up base stations here at the airport
that record the GPS data for all the instruments.
We are talking to the people in the weather office, at the tower, the air traffic
controllers, and that typically takes about a day of getting everybody settled
in here and preparing everything for the first science flight.
Narrator: With two complete flight crews available, science flights are planned
on consecutive days to collect as much data as possible over Antarctica.
Michael Studinger: On a typical Punta Arenas deployment we have about
300 flight hours. And if we fly as much as we can, which we typically do,
we kind of travel the distance in Antarctica that's equivalent
to three or four times around the equator.
Pilot: I think this is a glacier we're crossing.
Narrator: Flight tracks are carefully designed by the IceBridge
science team months in advance.
Survey lines need to be precise.
Not only to make repeat measurements in exact locations,
but also to ensure the plane keeps a safe distance from
Specially Protected Areas and animal habitats.
A sophisticated guidance system on the DC-8 helps the flight crew
keep the plane on track, and navigate around more than seventeen-hundred
known wildlife locations on the Antarctic continent.
Frank Cutler: Some of the flights are hand flown using moving map
displays that have a flight track depicted on them.
Others are guided by what's called the ATM instrument, where it
actually puts out a signal that we feed into the aircraft navigation system,
where it guides the airplane laterally.
John Sonntag: So the ATM stands for Airborne Topographic Mapper.
We designed a supplemental system to the ATM.
Some people call it the ATM Navigator.
What it does is it couples into the aircraft's own autopilot
and it helps it to steer the aircraft as accurate as we need it to be.
We can generally steer the airplane well within a hundred feet,
and often within 20 feet of where we want it to be.
And that means that if you imagine a line that represents our
desired track, more than half the time that line will lie
within the cabin of the aircraft.
Narrator: Antarctica's harsh and often unpredictable weather determines
when and where the IceBridge team will fly each day.
Navigator: I've got rising terrain, twelve o'clock, seven miles."
Pilot: Tallyho.
Pilot: Tallyho and I'm going to start climbing here.
Narrator: Pilots need perfect visibility of the terrain for safety.
Pilot: We'll clear it, and it does get steeper as we get closer to it,
so we can pitch up a little bit.
Narrator: Several science instruments need a clear line of sight
between the aircraft and the ground to collect proper measurements.
John Sonntag: Meteorology is obviously a very big deal with IceBridge.
It essentially governs everything that we do on any given day.
We have to fly down low and near the terrain in order for our instruments
to work as they're optimally designed to work.
So it means we need clear skies below the altitude at which we're operating
in order to do this kind of work.
We know from experience which parts of Antarctica are likely to have
good weather and which parts are not. So we design the missions so that each
of the missions has a maximum chance of success based on the likely weather scenarios.
Michael Studinger: We come up with with about twice as many
mission plans as we can possibly fly in the field.
That's simply so that we have enough target areas to choose from
that have good weather while we are here in the field.
And then we prioritize these plans.
John Sonntag: We have to spend a very large amount of our time
time while we're in the field trying to sort of ascertain
what the weather is going to do. It's a bit like reading tea leaves.
It's a very inexact science.
We depend entirely on what the meteorologists tell us through
computer models. We talk a lot to the meteorologists here at the airport
They're terrific. They give us a lot of help.
Narrator: The Chilean hosts provide everything from weather expertise,
to daily flight lunches for the IceBridge team.
Airport firefighters and emergency responders are also prepared to help
in case anything goes wrong with the aircraft.
Frank Cutler: So we don't use retread tires.
Jhony Zavaleta: (translates in Spanish)
Firefighter: (responds in Spanish)
Narrator: The DC-8 is not your typical airplane.
Structural enhancements, new engines, and cutting edge data systems
make the aircraft a versatile, long-endurance platform for Earth science research.
Frank Cutler: The DC-8 is uniquely capable for this kind of operation,
mainly because of its long legs. It can fly for about fourteen hours on a full fuel load.
Michael Studinger: We have to pretty much have to commute everyday
to Antarctica and commute back.And then we need, also,
the capability of collect several hours of data.
Typically on every flight we collect several terabytes of data all together.
So we have eight different science instruments on the aircraft.
And in total it's a very complex set of measurements that we take over ice sheets.
And doing it all at the same time in the same location from one airplane,
it's a really a tremendous resource.
Frank Cutler: It is amazing that a large airplane that was designed originally
to be an airliner could be so diverse.
But by its design it meets a lot of the requirements NASA had set
for the type of science studies they wanted to execute using an airplane to support.
This particular airplane was built in 1969. But many of the systems
have been upgraded over the years to keep up with current technology.
For instance, the airplane has a satellite communication system on it,
which something like that didn't even exist when it was originally built.
So what's nice about that is we can move data real-time during the flights
off the airplane to people anywhere in the world via the satellite system,
and then the Internet. And they can send us information real-time as well.
We can X-Chat. It's like texting back and forth to each other.
We can send photographs. We can send technical data.
You don't have to actually be on the flight to participate.
Bill Brockett: My view of this airplane is that it's the ideal airplane
for the kind of mission we use it for, because it's built very strong.
And in the old days when these were being designed and built,
the airplanes were overbuilt to be on the safe side.
We have a nickname for it. It's the DC-8, and the DC stands for Douglas Cable Car.
Because unlike the modern airplanes that use electronics and hydraulics
hydraulics to control the airplane in flight, this airplane is controlled with steel cables.
So we do hurricane research. We fly through hurricanes.
And we do a lot of different types of scientific research.
And the airplane can take a lot of damage that would cripple other more modern
airplanes and this airplane still flies fine. It's like an old truck.
It's solid, and almost indestructible.
Narrator: A wall of stickers at the Mission Director's console tells the story
of the many missions the DC-8 has flown since it went into NASA service in 1987.
This aircraft and many others operated by the NASA Airborne Science Program
fly thousands of hours every year, all over the world
to support a variety of Earth science research missions.
It takes careful coordination and detailed planning behind the scenes
to make these missions possible, and to gain a better understanding
of how our planet is changing.
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