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 It's quite old (1981) and was originally made by Hughes Aircraft (a Howard Hughes company).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.