The Antarctic Peninsula is a beautiful science site, and can be difficult to survey due to sometimes persistent cloud cover, but today OIB got great weather and carried out the “North Peninsula IS-2” mission successfully. Just great scenery, a few mild bumpy turbulence patches near the mountains, and a very good data day. All OIB instruments on NASA 817 performed well and reported good data collection.
Due to a less than favorable forecast and aircraft maintenance schedule, OIB will not fly tomorrow. This will allow us to catch up with data processing and analysis, and shift us back to an earlier in the day schedule.
Today’s flight path
Icebergs breaking from the Larsen C Ice Shelf
Edge of Larsen C Ice Shelf
ATM T6 wide scan elevation plot of one of the cracks in the Larsen C Ice Shelf, about 30 meters deep, and filled with a frozen mixture of sea ice and chunks of shelf ice (mélange*)
*Mélange or melange means “mixture” and originates from the Old French word “meslance”.[2] Ice mélange has also been referred to as “sikkussaq”[3] or “sikkusak”,[4] which is a Greenlandic word meaning packed by ice or surrounded by sea ice. The word is derived from the word “siku”, which means sea ice. (Wikipedia)
An ATM T7 green laser narrow scan elevation plot over a open sea ice lead with perhaps a meter or so of freeboard (height of sea ice above the water surface)
Toward the end of the science lines, it got fairly dark, and the ATM CAMBOT camera captured the ATM T6 wide scan and ATM T7 narrow scan on the snow surface. The individual laser shots on the T6 wide scan are distinct, on the T7 scan the laser shots overlap into a continuous line. The exposure time was just a bit longer than one T7 scan cycle.