The gusty wind didn’t make it easy to hold tight to a balloon so large. The balloon, a scientific instrument called an ozonesonde, was about to be released into the atmosphere above the Texas Gulf Coast by students from NASA’s SARP (Student Airborne Research Program), which concluded its summer session July 27. The balloon’s job […]
This month, engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California are testing a spacecraft sensor that will help measure how quickly Arctic sea ice is disappearing. And while that instrument won’t launch for another year, scientists started preparing for its use during a recent field campaign in the Canadian wilderness. Researchers spent two weeks […]
NASA’s Boeing 777 has returned to the agency’s fleet after undergoing heavy structural modifications as it transforms from a giant passenger plane into the agency’s next-generation airborne science laboratory. After a check flight and a three-hour transit from Waco, the aircraft returned to NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, on April 22. Since January […]
A team of NASA scientists deployed on an international mission designed to better understand severe winter storms. The North American Upstream Feature-Resolving and Tropopause Uncertainty Reconnaissance Experiment, or NURTURE, is an airborne campaign that uses a suite of remote sensing instruments to collect atmospheric data on winter weather with a goal of improving the models […]