Day 38: Home

Yesterday I traveled for ~24 hours from leaving the Ripan cabin to stepping through the threshold of my home in Boulder. The airlines routed me from Kiruna to Lulea to Stockholm to Chicago to Denver. Once home, I stayed up as late as possible and am awake this morning no earlier than 5:00 am local time. It always seems easier to adjust going west.

This will be my final entry for the AMISA weblog, so thank you to those who visited and I hope you have found it interesting.

Day 35: Ice Edge Study

In three hours we will leave for our third science flight. On this flight we will not meet the Oden, but rather overfly a grid along the ice edge as a calibration/validation mission to support the AMSR-E sensor (one of six sensors aboard the NASA Aqua satellite). We expect a nine hour flight.

I'll be leaving Thursday morning at 6:00 am local time to return to Boulder, but the science here will continue for one more week during which there will be two more science flights over the Oden icebreaker.

Day 32: Abisko National Park

Friday we flew our second science flight over the Oden. We saw some unusual geometric formations in the ice and the mission was successful. One instrument did not operate and we will open it today, Sunday, for inspection.

Saturday we had a day off. It was a "hard down" day, which is required every 11 days and means no one is to report to the aircraft. Barbara, and Jim from Leeds (UK) and Dave and I went to Abisko national park, which is about 100 km from Kiruna, where we are staying. It was a beautiful day and we hiked 12.5 km around the park.

From left to right, Barbara, Dave, Jim, and myself.

Day 30: The First AMISA Science Flight

... was a success, but we haven't slept much.

I've heard that a person will fully adjust about an hour a day when recovering from jetlag. Good thing that adjustment proved mostly unnecessary since our first science flight was from 11 am until 9 pm ... Colorado time (~7 pm to ~5 am local). We needed to intercept a storm as it passed in the vicinity of the Oden (a Swedish icebreaker participating in AMISA). It was a greatly successful mission over the ice, and we intercepted and overflew the Oden at just a few hundred feet altitude.

On the transit flight we also flew all night. This was around 2 am GMT, but notice the sun in the window... it never sets up there.


The view near the surface was remarkable. It is only dark here because of the overcast. Above the clouds is broad daylight.


This is my view to the front from my seat. All systems are go, and collecting data.


Here Al was looking at the data and watching the view outside as we approached the ice surface.


I also took a video as we passed over the ship. The passage is only a second or two at the end. There are better photos available, but I don't have them on my camera.

Day 28: Mission Science Tuesday

Our first science flight will be tomorrow. We will be intercepting an Arctic storm as it approaches the Oden icebreaker ship. Unfortunately for us, the timing of the interception puts us at a 7:00 pm local departure from Kiruna. The missions are 10 hours so we'll return at 5:00 am. So much for getting over jetlag-- that makes our flight all night long through the wee hours in Kiruna and... 11 am to 9 pm Colorado time.

We're all quite tired, but I have some good photos to upload when I can get a chance-- When we get back at 5:00 am Wednesday morning we have a de-briefing meeting then we can sleep for 6 hours or so until we need to get ready for the next flight planning meeting at 4:00 pm Wednesday night, because we'll need to run a follow-up flight on Thursday for a 9:00 am departure. We'll have Friday off most likely (unless an instrument has broken) and our third flight will be on Saturday which looks like it will also be 9:00 am.

Whew... bedtime.

Day 25: Ripan

We were up for 27 hours on Thursday. There was no Friday to speak of. The sun never set during our flight over. Today is Saturday at 12:30 AM local. I have slept just 4 hours now but we saw some remarkable weather on the way over. The hotel is smaller than expected and Internet access is a bit hard to come by at the moment. We have arrived.

Day 22: Test Flight

Today we had our final test flight before transit on Thursday. All instrument repairs yesterday were a success so we are 100% go for the mission.

Here are some photos from our R&R on Monday:

This is an 18-24 GHz 5-channel radiometer. Al's hands are pushing down some tie-down components. The instrument had a broken ferrite switch (the replaced switch is the 3-port part that forms a triangle below in the middle finger of Al's left hand).


Meanwhile Dave and I (Dave shown) worked on fixing this radiometer. It is a dual-channel 21/31 GHz radiometer. It's quite old (1981) and was originally made by Hughes Aircraft (a Howard Hughes company). This radiometer also had a dysfunctional ferrite switch.


Today, both instruments were back on the plane and we expect both to function during our transit flight on Thursday.

The weather forecast appears to show that a storm is headed for the Arctic and might intercept the Oden (the Swedish icebreaker that we are coordinating our efforts with) Friday morning. This would be the same time we would be transiting from Palmdale to Kiruna, so we may try to divert the flight to intercept the Oden and the storm front. Short version: we may have our first good scientific data set by Friday.

I'm still planning to do the video tour of the plane with all our instruments installed, just didn't get time today.

Day 20: Long time, no see

Last week we were swamped. I'll be sure to take more pictures this week. The quick news is that two of our instruments had trouble but replacement parts were received yesterday (Saturday) and we'll replace the broken parts. We leave for Sweden on Thursday, but before that we'll have a second check flight on Tuesday.

Overall, things are going very well and we'll be packing up soon. Photos of the instrument R&R tomorrow.