For more than 65 hours this month, NASA’s high-altitude ER-2 aircraft flew from Fairbanks over melting sea ice, glaciers, forests, permafrost, lakes, volcanoes and more. It zigged and zagged over the Beaufort Sea, and soared straight over the Bagley Ice Field. The goal: to use a laser altimeter called MABEL to take elevation measurements over […]
Over four missions, astronaut Carl Walz logged 231 days in space. Before the launch of the International Space Station resupply Orb-2 mission from Wallops Island, Virginia, in July 2014, he described a few of views of Earth from space that he remembers best. Walz is now Vice President of Human Space Flight Operations at Orbital, […]
Burning and Suppression of Solids (BASS)-II Operations: Flight Engineer (FE)-5 Wiseman conducted flame tests for the BASS-II investigation which examines the burning and extinction characteristics of a wide variety of fuel samples in microgravity. Today, Wiseman burned four samples of 2 centimeter wide acrylic slabs. The slabs measured 1, 2, 4, and 5 millimeters thick. …
FLame Extinguishment Experiment (FLEX)-2 Operations: Commander (CDR) Swanson removed the Combustion Integration Rack (CIR) alignment guides which isolated the rack and allowed ground teams to start another FLEX-2 test point via ground commanding. FLEX-2 uses small droplets of fuel to study the special burning characteristics of fire in space. This test session will utilize 50% …
Automated Transfer Vehicle (ATV)-5 Launch: ATV-5 George Lemaitre launched today at 6:47pm CDT from Kourou, French Guiana. Ascent was nominal. Solar array and antenna deployment occurred on schedule. The cargo vehicle is scheduled to dock to the ISS Service Module aft port on August 12. Burning and Suppression of Solids (BASS)-II Operations: Flight Engineer (FE)-6 …
After just over a full week at sea, we have found the rhythm of our life and work routines. We collect water with the CTD rosette, deploy instruments over the side of the ship, work in the lab, eat, and sleep. That might sound like a lot of work and no play, but we do […]
Palettes aren’t the only important decision when visualizing data with color: you also need to consider scaling. Not only is the choice of start and end points (the lowest and highest values) critical, but the way intermediate values are stretched between them.
Burning and Suppression of Solids (BASS)-II Operations: Flight Engineer (FE)-6 Gerst conducted flame tests for the BASS-II investigation. The concurrent rods were burned as well as flat nomex fabric sample. The BASS-II investigation examines the burning and extinction characteristics of a wide variety of fuel samples in microgravity. The BASS-II experiment will guide strategies for …
VIIRS Day-Night Band data is spectacular, but takes a little bit of work to visualize.
As the ER-2 pilot got ready for his first flight out of Fairbanks, I wondered what it’s like piloting the aircraft, all by himself, 65,000 feet up. The NASA ER-2 pilots for this campaign, Tim Williams and Denis Steele, are flying the MABEL instrument to study the glaciers and ice sheets. Before they fly, they […]
