March 16, 2011 Today was the day I had been waiting for all week. It was the first flight day of the IceBridge operation out of Thule, Greenland. Flying today had a special meaning to me for a few different reasons. I recently was selected to become a Navy pilot, which is a goal I […]
March 16, 2011 My alarm clock was set for 5:30 this morning to wake up, shower, get some breakfast and be at the hanger no later than 7 a.m. for an 8 a.m. take off. The weather was good for our target area north of the Canadian archipelago (islands), to survey the sea ice beneath […]
Stargazers are in for a big treat this weekend! On Mar. 19 the full moon will brighten the night sky as the biggest full moon seen in almost two decades. The moon will be at perigee, its closest point to Earth — only 221,565 miles (356,575 km) away. The moon’s orbit around Earth is not circular — …
NASA’s Mercury MESSENGER spacecraft is preparing to insert itself into orbit tonight, Mar. 17. While you may not have a seat, you can still see Mercury tonight after sunset from the comfort of planet Earth. Close-up image of a portion of Mercury’s surface, captured on a MESSENGER fly-byon Oct. 6, 2008. (NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics …
March 14, 2011 Today was busy day; a cargo shipment arrived with some instruments for the ground stations at 1430, and the P-3 arrived from Wallops Island, Va., at 1535. The air temperatures were about 20 below zero, with wind chills around minus 30 degrees Celsius. I was able to get right outside the hanger, […]
March 11, 2011 My research is focused primarily on sea ice and using airborne measurements to infer sea ice thickness over an area of the Arctic. If only the person sitting in the window seat knew that, maybe he would have understood why I kept leaning over him to get a look out the window. […]
March 12, 2o11 Saturday morning at Thule AFB is pretty slow paced. MIDN Brugler and I went to the gym around 0730, and we were the only ones there, except for a few Air Force guys. We had a lazy but productive morning (laundry, some research, email) in preparation for our sled ride trek in […]
March 11, 2011 **We woke up to some horrible news about the Earthquake and subsequent Tsunami that struck Japan, and then threatened the Hawaiian Island and West Coast of the U.S. I taught the Intro to Oceanography course at USNA, and 2 of the core objectives are introducing the student’s to earthquakes and tsunamis. I […]
March 10, 2011 LCDR John Woods is a Meteorology and Oceanography Officer (METOC) currently teaching in the Oceanography Department at the United States Naval Academy (USNA). He is part of the Sea Ice Thickness Observation team joined NASA’s Operation IceBridge mission in the field for the Arctic 2011 campaign. (OIB 2011). Most midshipmen at USNA […]
Watching the skies is much more than a hobby with the Marshall Center’s Bill Cooke, lead of the Meteoroid Environment office — it’s an obsession. Each morning when Cooke logs on to his computer, he quickly checks email for the daily update from the fireball camera network. Groups of smart cameras in Cooke’s new Fireball network triangulate the …
