NASA’s Earth Ventures Social
Story: John Kilmer
Photography: John Kilmer, Christopher Lohff
As dawn starts to break on a brisk Tuesday morning, the color gradient of the desert sky begins to change from hues of deep blue, purple, to finally, that impeccable golden light. The bumpy roads didn’t seem to bother me that bad when I’m accompanied with silhouettes of Joshua Trees, a sunrise that would make Bob Ross smile, and a hot cup of coffee.
Approaching in the distance, you can see the abundance of hangars at Plant 42 welcoming you as you pass within Palmdale’s city limits. As much as I wanted to be inside the notorious “Skunk Works” hangar, I had the incredible privilege to attend NASA’s Earth Ventures Social a few blocks down at NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center to get an inside look at their airborne research platforms. These platforms included airframes such as their B200 Super King Air, C-20A UAVSAR Science Aircraft, a modified 747SP better known as SOFIA, and not to mention (stay tuned for a future article for Full Disc on this one) NASA’s ER-2 High Altitude Science Aircraft.
The utility player, the renaissance man, the jack of all trades: the Beechcraft King Air. This isn’t the most impressive airframe in NASA’s inventory when compared with the rest of their fleet, but it does play a very vital role in their mission. As we walked up to NASA’s B200, I couldn’t help snapping a few photos as it sat proud under a giant banner representing NASA’s Flight Research Center.
Greeting us at the B200 was Hernan Posada, a research pilot who has been with NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research center since 2005, flying remotely unmanned aircraft and multiple support aircraft like the King Air. Hernan discussed the importance of NASA 801. This test bed serves with conducting flight experiments such as the X-38 Space-Integrated GPS Internal Navigation System, which led to the development of the GN&C system on the International Space Station, but we dove into the details of the future stateside deployments that are planned for this King Air throughout 2020.
Let’s talk about S-MODE. No no…not the operating system used in your typical Windows computer. We’re talking about the Sub-Mesoscale Ocean Dynamics Experiment. NASA 801, along with two other research aircraft and research vessels, will be outfitted with an array of instrumentation for measuring temperature salinity and ocean velocity across various time and spatial scales. The hypothesis here is that sub-mesoscale ocean dynamics make important contributions to vertical exchange of climate and biological variables in the upper ocean.
Another mission the King Air is joining in February is A.C.T.I.V.A.T.E. Hernan explained the acronym: Aerosol Cloud meTeorology Interactions oVer the western ATlantic Experiment. This special campaign will look at the critical role that marine boundary layer clouds play in Earth’s energy balance and water cycle. Flying in a coordinated fashion, NASA’s King Air and Dassault Falcon, equipped with remote sensing and in-situ instruments, will hopefully draw definite conclusions about the interactions between aerosols, clouds and meteorology on climate.
While these missions include their King Air, they also include NASA’s C-20A and its UAVSAR belly pod. Luckily, I had the opportunity to pick the brain of another NASA pilot John McGrath to explain the importance of the UAVSAR pod and how it plays a role in these missions. The UAVSAR pod sits underneath the C-20 while all being attached to a MAU-12 ejector rack. Ahh yes, the same ejector rack used on F-15’s, F-16’s, and B-52’s to hold their payloads. All I could think about after hearing that was imagining this Gulfstream wreaking havoc with some Mk-82’s, but my daydreams of unrealistic expectations were shot down as McGrath explained the many uses the UAVSAR pod has.
UAVSAR stands for “Uninhabited Air Vehicle Synthetic Aperture Radar” and was developed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab to highlight different features and show the changes in the Earth over time. There’s different types of radar that this pod can utilize, like UAVSAR-L, a L-band Radar to observe surface deformation such as earthquakes, fault activities, levee health, flooding, oil spills, and changes in vegetation structure. UAVSAR-P uses the long wavelength “P-Band” radar for subsurface and sub-canopy imaging used to monitor forest and permafrost changes, root zone, soil moisture and detecting underground structures and subsurface changes. The last variant of UAVSAR is UAVSAR-Ka that uses Ka-Band interferometric synthetic aperture radar to map land surface topography while making a single pass, since the other variants of UAVSAR require multiple precision passes within 15 feet to obtain proper reading for geophysical and environmental research missions. All of these missions obtain information about Earth’s climate, but I was fortunate enough to hop onto SOFIA to get an in-depth look at observing the cosmos.
The queen of the skies, the future of air travel. Luxury at cruising altitude. “Champagne Sir?” Don’t mind if I do! Revolutionizing commercial air travel in the 70’s was Boeing’s proudest achievement; the 747. But there’s a 747 that’s a hometown favorite amongst the populous of Palmdale. NASA’s 747SP, better known as “SOFIA”. My first encounter with SOFIA was years ago as I was driving to work one morning. At 5am, I noticed a bright light lumbering across the desert heading west towards Palmdale, later finding out that was SOFIA returning home from an overnight mission. Fast forward to now, as I’m walking into NASA’s hangar looking at SOFIA towering over all the other aircraft in the facility.
SOFIA stands for Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy and is a heavily modified Boeing 747SP used as a flying telescope. This isn’t NASA’s first rodeo when it comes to flying telescopes and observatories. In 1965, NASA had modified a Convair 990 and placed windows along the top of the fuselage to study the solar eclipse from inside the path of totality. In 1968, NASA installed a 12-inch infrared telescope in a Learjet 23 to study objects like our neighboring planets. From 1975-1995, NASA used a 36-inch reflecting telescope aboard a C-141 to study beyond our solar system. But after 1995, development began on a larger, more powerful infrared telescope, and on May-26-2010, in partnership with DLR, SOFIA’s telescope saw first light.
Flying in the range of 40,000ft during its overnight missions, SOFIA has the upper advantage when it comes to visibility since they operate above 99% of Earth’s infrared blocking atmosphere. The advantage gives SOFIA’s scientist the opportunity to operate anywhere in the world to observe star birth and death, black holes, and more celestial events. A majority of these events and objects in the universe emit their energy at infrared wavelengths, which are usually invisible when observed with visible light, but infrared energy is able to see beyond the celestial clouds of gas and dust blocking the light from more distant objects.
What really intrigued me about SOFIA’s operation was the maintenance behind the scenes to keep her airworthy. SOFIA isn’t built on your ordinary 747 you’d see hauling freight and passengers at a major airport. SOFIA is a 747SP, which was a variant of the 747-100’s made back in the mid-1970’s for longer routes. Boeing took the original 747 design and shortened the fuselage, increased the size of the vertical stabilizer, and re-designed the flaps. Production of the SP’s only lasted 7 years with 45 SP’s made (9-10 still flying today) which makes it difficult to maintain, due to the fact that parts are so hard to come by. Not to mention a lot of tribal knowledge being lost, as maintainers and engineers from that era have either retired or passed away. There’s no future plans to replace SOFIA, so, in the interest of capturing her majestic form before she leaves us, you can find myself and other photographers joining together at the famous “BJ’s Corner” to watch her depart in the setting sun.
Spending the morning at NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center and getting the privilege to learn about their airborne science platforms will be a memory I’ll never forget and a perspective gained whenever I see their aircraft fly overhead. Stay tuned as we release a second article on this event where we cover their ER-2 and how it plays a crucial role in monitoring the environment and the preparation of suiting up the pilots to fly at high altitudes.
