April 30, 2011 Greetings from Greenland Canada! Tom Neumann and I are en route to Greenland’s ice sheet for about two weeks of field work. Yesterday morning we flew from warm and sunny Maryland to Schenectady, New York, where we stocked up on food. This morning we got up at 4:30am in order to catch a ride […]
One of the best things about international travel (at least to a geek like me) is to see how different cultures approach design and signage. Here’s a few from Blue Mountains National Park, near Sydney, Australia.
MABEL: Flying on a high-altitude aircraft at the brink of space, the MABEL instrument is helping scientists to simulate measurements from NASA’s next ice-observing satellite, ICESat-2. April 8, 2011 Today, I caught this video on the NASAexplorer channel on YouTube: It covers Jake Bleacher’s work in understanding lava-sheet inflation (see his video, which covers this interesting […]
MABEL: Flying on a high-altitude aircraft at the brink of space, the MABEL instrument is helping scientists to simulate measurements from NASA’s next ice-observing satellite, ICESat-2. April 7, 2011 MABEL flew her final science mission of 2011 (4/5) over White Sands Missile Range. The weather over this area was clear when we flew it, however, weather […]
MABEL: Flying on a high-altitude aircraft at the brink of space, the MABEL instrument is helping scientists to simulate measurements from NASA’s next ice-observing satellite, ICESat-2. April 5, 2011 We had another highly successful mission, this time to Colorado (4/1/2011). Specifically, we targeted a field that usually holds snow late in the season. Additionally, we targeted […]
MABEL: Flying on a high-altitude aircraft at the brink of space, the MABEL instrument is helping scientists to simulate measurements from NASA’s next ice-observing satellite, ICESat-2. April 4, 2011 Palmdale, Calif. – Well, it took three tries, but we finally collected excellent MABEL data over a forested area in the Sierras. While we were flying the first […]
What are the signs of spring? They are as familiar as a blooming daffodil, a songbird at dawn, a surprising shaft of warmth from the afternoon sun. And, oh yes, don’t forget the meteors. “Spring is fireball season,” says Bill Cooke of NASA’s Meteoroid Environment Center. “For reasons we don’t fully understand, the rate of …
MABEL: Flying on a high-altitude aircraft at the brink of space, the MABEL instrument is helping scientists to simulate measurements from NASA’s next ice-observing satellite, ICESat-2. Palmdale, Calif. – MABEL had a very successful second flight on March 24! Taking off from NASA’s Dryden Aircraft Operations Facility in Palmdale, Calif., we flew a second flight over the […]
MABEL flies aboard NASA’s ER-2, which is a research version of the Air Force’s U2 reconnaissance aircraft. MABEL specifically flies in the nose cone of the ER-2. The ER-2 is special because it flies at a very high altitude. MABEL’s data is collected at approximately 65,000 feet above sea level, putting the instrument above much […]
March 25, 2011 This past Tuesday (3/22), MABEL had her first successful flight of 2011! After just a day of hooking MABEL up to the aircraft and checking out her systems (image below), we flew the instrument on what we consider to be a ‘shakedown’ mission. We flew a route local to the Dryden Flight Research […]
