We’ve begun our Summer deployment up here in Thule, which is a mostly new experience for us – we’re not usually in Thule this time of year! We are flying on the NASA Falcon N524NA with the wonderful folks out of Langley for the next couple of weeks.
I will be sending out periodic reports to keep you updated with our progress during our time here. Like always, if you want to be removed from this list or want to have someone added, just write me back and let me know.
The Falcon and its crew arrived on Thursday, with the rest of us arriving on Friday after a 24-hour delay due to weather. We were able to immediately get the GPS ground station set up and test our instruments in the plane on Friday in preparation for a possible flight on Monday (today).
Today we ended up flying “Convergence West”. I have attached the flight plan – which is slightly misleading, because data was collected along the transit to and from the site (not just the target area). We had no problems and everything worked smoothly – which is largely due to the many weeks of preparation of everyone on the team leading up to this point.
I’ve also attached a few pictures taken by Kyle Krabill. Notice the lack of snow and sea ice over the bay – aside from the mosquitoes, it is actually very pleasant here: +40F is much nicer than -30F, that’s for sure!
Until tomorrow,
Rob
