NASA to launch research flights from Wright-Patterson AFB
May 25, 2009 Filed in: Wright-Patterson
AFB
Monday, May 25, 2009
WRIGHT-PATTERSON AIR FORCE BASE, Ohio – A modified U-2 spy plane is to spend part of its summer here as NASA flies missions across the northern and eastern United States in support of global warming research.
One of NASA’s
two ER-2 aircraft, pilots and a support
team will relocate temporarily to
Wright-Patterson Air
Force Base from the Dryden Flight
Research Center at Edwards Air Force Base in
California. It will carry a special sensor
developed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in
Pasadena, Calif., to study earth resources.
The Lockheed ER-2 is essentially the same airplane as the U-2 “Dragon Lady” originally flown by the CIA in the 1950s and still flown in updated versions by the Air Force. In the single-seat jet, a pilot in a pressure suit flies solitary, daylong missions at altitudes that can exceed 70,000 feet. While other military jets have come and gone, the venerable U-2 has proved difficult to replace.
The airplane is scheduled to arrive on June 24 and remain for about a month, according to Michael Eastwood of JPL. It’s to make a public flyby on June 26 as part of the Air Force Materiel Command’s Freedom’s Call Tattoo. The white jet will be an unusual sight with its 104-foot, glider-like wings with a long pod on each wing.
Wright-Patterson will make a convenient staging base for flights over northern Michigan, northern Wisconsin, the Adirondack Mountains and western Maryland, according to one of two scientists who will analyze the data it collects.
Besides being closer to its science targets, Wright-Patterson has a big hangar that can house the ER-2 and the capability to service it with JP-7, a special grade of jet fuel, Philip A. Townsend, associate professor of forest ecology at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, said by telephone last week.
Townsend and Scott Ollinger, associate professor of natural resources at the University of New Hampshire, will use the ER-2 to collect imagery of forests with a special system called AVIRIS, short for Airborne Visible and Infrared Imaging Spectrometer.
AVIRIS is “like a fancy camera” that fits inside a payload bay behind the cockpit, said Eastwood, AVIRIS systems engineer and line manager. Instead of snapping ordinary pictures, it takes digital images that simultaneously capture light in 224 contiguous channels, or spectral bands.
Minerals, vegetation and other materials reflect light in specific ways at different wavelengths. By imaging light reflected from the surface of the earth, “We’re detecting molecules on the ground from 70,000 feet (up), which is pretty remarkable,” Eastwood said.
The ER-2 takes AVIRIS 12 miles or more above the earth, where it can image a swath more than six miles wide, according to NASA documents. AVIRIS can show nutrient concentrations in a forest much more quickly than ground-based sensors and in much greater detail than space satellites, Ollinger said. “It’s midway between working on the ground and working in space.”
Ollinger and Townsend are doing separate studies, but both are aimed at learning how well forests can absorb carbon dioxide (CO2), a greenhouse gas that contributes to global warming. Healthy, growing forests can pull more CO2 out of the atmosphere, so forest growth rates are an important factor in forecasting global warming trends, Townsend said.
Ollinger said scientists have learned the nitrogen level in a forest is strongly related to its albedo, or the percentage of sunlight it reflects back into space. Nitrogen-rich forests reflect more sunlight, which reduces global warming. “Now we’re trying to see if those same results are true for grasslands and agricultural” areas, he said.
The ER-2 and AVIRIS take to a high state of art the practice of overhead photoreconnaissance pioneered in the Dayton region. The late George W. Goddard organized the Air Force’s aerial photography laboratory at old McCook Field in the 1920s. The work was later transferred to Wright Field, now Area B of Wright-Patterson. END
The Lockheed ER-2 is essentially the same airplane as the U-2 “Dragon Lady” originally flown by the CIA in the 1950s and still flown in updated versions by the Air Force. In the single-seat jet, a pilot in a pressure suit flies solitary, daylong missions at altitudes that can exceed 70,000 feet. While other military jets have come and gone, the venerable U-2 has proved difficult to replace.
The airplane is scheduled to arrive on June 24 and remain for about a month, according to Michael Eastwood of JPL. It’s to make a public flyby on June 26 as part of the Air Force Materiel Command’s Freedom’s Call Tattoo. The white jet will be an unusual sight with its 104-foot, glider-like wings with a long pod on each wing.
Wright-Patterson will make a convenient staging base for flights over northern Michigan, northern Wisconsin, the Adirondack Mountains and western Maryland, according to one of two scientists who will analyze the data it collects.
Besides being closer to its science targets, Wright-Patterson has a big hangar that can house the ER-2 and the capability to service it with JP-7, a special grade of jet fuel, Philip A. Townsend, associate professor of forest ecology at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, said by telephone last week.
Townsend and Scott Ollinger, associate professor of natural resources at the University of New Hampshire, will use the ER-2 to collect imagery of forests with a special system called AVIRIS, short for Airborne Visible and Infrared Imaging Spectrometer.
AVIRIS is “like a fancy camera” that fits inside a payload bay behind the cockpit, said Eastwood, AVIRIS systems engineer and line manager. Instead of snapping ordinary pictures, it takes digital images that simultaneously capture light in 224 contiguous channels, or spectral bands.
Minerals, vegetation and other materials reflect light in specific ways at different wavelengths. By imaging light reflected from the surface of the earth, “We’re detecting molecules on the ground from 70,000 feet (up), which is pretty remarkable,” Eastwood said.
The ER-2 takes AVIRIS 12 miles or more above the earth, where it can image a swath more than six miles wide, according to NASA documents. AVIRIS can show nutrient concentrations in a forest much more quickly than ground-based sensors and in much greater detail than space satellites, Ollinger said. “It’s midway between working on the ground and working in space.”
Ollinger and Townsend are doing separate studies, but both are aimed at learning how well forests can absorb carbon dioxide (CO2), a greenhouse gas that contributes to global warming. Healthy, growing forests can pull more CO2 out of the atmosphere, so forest growth rates are an important factor in forecasting global warming trends, Townsend said.
Ollinger said scientists have learned the nitrogen level in a forest is strongly related to its albedo, or the percentage of sunlight it reflects back into space. Nitrogen-rich forests reflect more sunlight, which reduces global warming. “Now we’re trying to see if those same results are true for grasslands and agricultural” areas, he said.
The ER-2 and AVIRIS take to a high state of art the practice of overhead photoreconnaissance pioneered in the Dayton region. The late George W. Goddard organized the Air Force’s aerial photography laboratory at old McCook Field in the 1920s. The work was later transferred to Wright Field, now Area B of Wright-Patterson. END
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