Title: Airborne Science Program
Designer: Paul Windham/Ames Research Center
Year it was designed: 2008
Explanation or story behind the patch: The Airborne Science Program encompasses the DC-8, ER-2, and Global Hawk platforms at NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center and the P3 and WB-57. The logo came about as part of a program competition at 2007’s American Geophysical Union Fall Conference in San Francisco. Andrew Roberts was the Program Director at the time and wanted a symbol that showed a cohesive program versus a collection of aircraft projects and something that could be used program wide. The initial and final design came about from a collaboration between Paul Windham and Bruce Coffland (both from the Airborne Science Facility at ARC), and Randy Albertson. The key elements are a generic long-wing aircraft symbolic of many airborne science platforms, a map of the entire Earth symbolic of the global nature of our program, and the swoosh and stars highlighting our NASA connection/heritage. The black disk ties to NASA Earth Science Division’s focus of its predominant view of Earth from space. The colors of the outer ring and border come from the NASA logo. Its design was finalized in early 2008 and has been in use for NASA’s Airborne Science Program ever since.