From Paul Newman, GloPac co-project scientist: A flight day with the Global Hawk flight day starts very early and runs very late. For a 7 AM takeoff, the plane must be pulled out to a concrete pad adjacent to the runway at about 4 AM. This means the crew must arrive by 3 AM to get […]
Like the booby bird, the Global Hawk is graceful in the air but awkward on the ground.
I cruised into the hangar and found a beehive of activity around the Global Hawk…Now I’m on the two most important tasks at the start of a field mission. 1) Find the coffee pot. 2) Find the bathroom.
The Global Hawk is a unique robotic plane that can fly for more than 30 hours at a time, soaring as high as 65,000 feet and as far as 11,000 nautical miles (12,659 miles).
Last night, we took load #1 of equipment down the mountain. Today was dedicated to packing up & hauling the rest of the equipment down with the snowcat. A bit of a snowstorm is in the forecast, and we need to get our equipment down before it hits. Sound familiar? Friday, a truck will take […]
Today is our last day of measurements. We took a radiometer measurement in the morning, and then dug the final snowpit in the exact spot that the radiometer was viewing during the whole experiment. That way, we will know exactly what the radiometer was seeing. The pit measurements took hours and it was cold today […]
Here is how we “commute’” to the lab each morning. Dr. Noah Molotch (U. Colorado), Dr. Dan Berisford (JPL) Jen Petrzelka (U. Colorado), and Ty Atkins spent all day today (and the previous 2 days) making snowpit measurements using both traditional and new high-tech methods. In this photo, you can see how deep the snowpit […]
A big milestone today: after the DC snowstorm, the cross-country shipping, the snowcat trip up the mountain, and the days of wiring, we finally got radiometer data today. Dr. Mike Durand and Ty Atkins (U. Colorado) worked really hard to set up a stand built by Goddard engineers to hold the radiometer at just the […]
Sunrise on top of the mountain was beautiful—even the LN2 tank was glowing.
We finished the radiometer wiring today. The data logger we installed to record measurements isn’t working 100%, so we switched to a backup method. We worked so late, we had to stay the night on top of the mountain. The lab has bunks. It got quite cold outside at night, about -14C (7F), but not […]
