Each program is to cost less than US$30M (€24.5M), including development, deployment and data analysis and the projects will involve six NASA centers, 22 educational institutions, nine international government agencies and three industrial partners.
The first mission is the Carbon in Arctic Reservoirs Vulnerability Experiment (CARVE) run by NASA Jet Propulsion, and designed to measure the release and absorption of carbon cycling from Arctic ecosystems, including carbon dioxide and methane release. A Twin Otter aircraft will carry an instrument package for airborne measurements.
The Airborne Microwave Observatory of Subcanopy and Subsurface, led by the University of Michigan, will monitor the GHG global exchange of CO2 and other gases within the atmosphere by measuring soil moisture in the root zone of representative regions of major North American ecosystems. The research will also use NASA's Gulfstream-III aircraft to carry synthetic aperture radar that can penetrate several feet into the soil surface.
The Airborne Tropical Tropopause Experiment from the NASA Ames Research Center, will monitor water vapor in the stratosphere, the ozone layer and how much solar energy Earth retains. This will help model the flow of atmospheric gases at high altitudes, and will be flown using NASA's Global Hawk systems. The flights will study chemical and physical processes at different times of year from bases in California, Guam, Hawaii and Australia.
The fourth mission is the Deriving Information on Surface Conditions from Column and Vertically Resolved Observations Relevant to Air Quality. This is a NASA Langley Research Center program to measure air quality factors like aerosols and ozone-producing gases in the atmospheric column. To determine concentrations at ground level, airborne, surface and satellite observations will be taken simultaneously using NASA's B-200 and P-3B research aircraft fused with space based observations.
The fifth program is the Hurricane and Severe Storm Sentinel from NASA Goddard Space Flight Center that will be used to predict the intensity of hurricanes in the Atlantic Ocean basin using two NASA Global Hawks flying high above the storms for up to 30 hours.
Via NASA
Trevor Williams is a University of Victoria Mechanical Engineering PhD candidate specializing in renewable energy, power grid modeling and plug-in hybrid electric vehicles. He has a bachelors in Aeronautical Engineering, a Masters in Management Science and over 23 years international experience in the space industry, having worked on Earth observation and telecommunications satellites. He is the author of the Eco-Geek blog.
Show/Hide comment form
