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Fairbanks Daily News-Miner Article |
Reprinted with permission from Dermot Cole, Editor, Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, Tuesday, June 2, 1998
They don't call it a takeoff when the ER-2 lifts off from Fort Wainwright on NASA scientific observation flights that go hundreds of miles northwest of Barrow.
They call it a launch.
That's because the ER-2 aircraft, a larger version of the U-2 spy plane, reaches its cruising altitude of 65,000 feet in 20 minutes.
For another week the ER-2 is to be flying out of Fort Wainwright as part of the Arctic Cloud Experiment project, in which aircraft, a ground station, an ice station and satellites are measuring the Arctic Ocean atmosphere to further the study of global climate change.
Six prototype remote sensors on the ER-2 are used to analyze clouds that form near leads opening up in the ice on the Arctic Ocean.
Project Manager David McDougal, who is in Fairbanks from NASA's Langley Research Center in Virginia, said the clouds form over the leads and that reduces the amount of the Sun's radiation reaching the surface.
The complex relationship of the clouds, sun, ice and water is not well understood, he said.
While the ER-2 flies about 13 miles above the ocean, a Convair [CV-580] from the University of Washington flies through the clouds to take measurements inside them, he said.
Additional readings are taken from the ground at Barrow and from the Arctic Ocean where the Canadian Coast Guard icebreaker "Des Groseilliers" is frozen in the drifting ice pack as part of a $19 million National Science Foundation effort called Project SHEBA. That stands for the Surface Heat Budget of the Arctic Ocean.
On Monday, the icebreaker was 431 miles northwest of Barrow.
On recent flights the ER-2 has started crossing into air space controlled by the Russians, flights for which NASA has received approval from Moscow.
A few weeks ago, when a [NCAR] C-130 was also making research flights, about 70 people were in Fairbanks for the tests. That number is now down to about 40, McDougal said.
The ER-2 flights are to conclude June 7, but there will be a second phase of research flights in July.
