NASA Operation IceBridge – What It Takes To Execute a Major International Airborne Research Campaign

Research flights are underway in Thule, Greenland for the Spring 2015 campaign of NASA’s Operation IceBridge mission. IceBridge is the largest airborne survey of Earth’s polar ice ever flown.

NASA scientists have been studying rapidly changing features of land and sea ice over Greenland and Antarctica since 2009, when NASA’s Ice, Cloud and Land Elevation Satellite (ICESat) stopped collecting data. Airborne measurements of polar ice will continue until a replacement satellite, ICESat-2, is launched in 2017.

Although IceBridge is entering its seventh year of polar observations, the planning involved in executing this major international mission is hardly routine.

This extended feature video, from the flight operations perspective, follows the IceBridge team from NASA's Armstrong Aircraft Operations Facility in Palmdale, California, to Punta Arenas, Chile during the Fall 2014 Antarctic campaign.

It describes the many facets that go into coordinating a major airborne science mission like IceBridge, and highlights the unique capabilities of the NASA DC-8, a former passenger plane that has been heavily modified to carry state-of-the-art instrumentation for Earth science research. The DC-8 is one of several research aircraft operated by the NASA Airborne Science Program to study the Earth system.

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NASA Armstrong Flight Operations Facility, Building 703