Sep. 24, 2015

For the first time in its seven years of flights, NASA's Operation IceBridge, an airborne survey of changes in Earth’s polar ice, is conducting overlapping campaigns in Antarctica and the Arctic. Since 2009, IceBridge has studied Antarctic ice conditions each fall, but this year a new field campaign has been added to collect measurements of sea and land ice in the Arctic to provide insight into the impact of the summer melt season.
The Antarctic campaign was the first to kick off on Sept. 22, as IceBridge successfully completed its first research flight over the southernmost continent. Antarctic flights continue until Nov. 2. The first flight of the Arctic campaign is scheduled for Sept. 23, weather permitting, with ongoing flights until Oct. 23.

Up North
The Arctic campaign team will fly aboard NASA Langley Research Center's Falcon 20 aircraft. The plane will carry three instruments: a laser altimeter called the Airborne Topographic Mapper, a high-resolution camera technology called the Digital Mapping System (DMS), which allows researchers to create maps of polar ice, and an experimental infrared camera.
One of the main challenges of this campaign will be racing to catch enough hours of sunlight, said John Sonntag, mission scientist for the Arctic campaign.
“This time of the year in the Arctic, we lose seven minutes of sunlight every day,” Sonntag said. “By the time we end the campaign, we’ll only have about nine hours of daylight a day, barely enough to squeeze in our daily two three-and-a-half-hour flights, plus refueling.”
The first leg of the Arctic post-melt season mission will be based out of Thule Air Base in northwest Greenland. Four land ice flights and six sea ice flights are planned from there.

Image:
(Left)(Maps) Operation IceBridge’s planned flight lines over Arctic and Antarctic land and sea ice in Sept-Nov. 2015.
(Right)(Photo) Sea ice in the Bellingshausen Sea seen by the Digital Mapping System instrument during the 2014 Antarctic campaign of Operation IceBridge.