NASA'sunpiloted Global Hawk aircraft drone has successfully completed its firstscience flight over the Pacific Ocean.
Theflight, the first of five scheduled for this month, is part of the GlobalHawk Pacific (GloPac) mission, intended to study atmospheric science overthe Pacific and Arctic oceans.
NASA?sGlobal Hawkis a robotic plane that can fly autonomously to altitudes above 60,000 feet(18.3 kilometers) — roughly twice as high as a commercial airliner — and as faras 11,000 nautical miles (20,000 kilometers) — half the circumference of Earth.
InWednesday's flight, the plane flew approximately 4,500 nautical miles (8,300kilometers) along a flight path that took it from Dryden to just south ofAlaska's Kodiak Island, at 150.3 degrees West longitude and 54.6 degrees NorthLatitude.
Theaircraftsystem carries 11 instruments to sample the chemical composition of Earth'stwo lowest atmospheric layers, to profile the dynamics and meteorology of both,and to observe the distribution of clouds and aerosol particles. Projectscientists hope to take observations from the equator to the Arctic Circle, andalso west of Hawaii.
"TheGlobal Hawk is a fantastic platform because it gives us expanded access to theatmosphere beyond what we have with piloted aircraft," said David Fahey,co-mission scientist and research physician at NOAA's Earth System ResearchLaboratory in Boulder, Colo. "We can go to regions we couldn't reach or goto previously explored regions and study them for extended periods that areimpossible with conventional planes."
NASApilots and flight engineers, working with colleagues from the National Oceanicand Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), pre-program a flight path, after whichthe Global Hawk flies itself for up to 30 hours, staying in contact throughsatellite and line-of-site communications to the ground control station atNASA's Dryden Flight Research Center in California's Mojave Desert.
"TheGlobalHawk is a revolutionary aircraft for science because of its enormous rangeand endurance," Paul Newman, co-mission scientist for GloPac and anatmospheric scientist from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md,said in a statement. "No other science platform provides this much rangeand time to sample rapidly evolving atmospheric phenomena."
Researchershave already gathered some measurements from the polar vortex from Wednesday'sflight.
Severalinstruments will measure aerosols, which play an important but incompletelyunderstood role in Earth's energy budget. Some aerosols absorb warmingsunlight, while others reflect it back to space and cool the planet. High-altitudeparticles can serve as nuclei for the formation of clouds.
GloPacwill make several flights directly under the path of NASA's Aura satellite andother Earth-observing satellites, "allowing us to calibrate and confirmwhat we see from space," Newman said. GloPac missions are being conductedin conjunction with NASA's Aura Validation Experiment (AVE).
Duringits first science flight, the Global Hawk flew under the Cloud-Aerosol LIDARand Infrared Pathfinder Satellite Observation (CALIPSO), a joint project ofNASA and France's Centre National d'Etudes Spatiales.
