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Newswise — The University of North Dakota-NASA National Suborbital Education and Research Center (NSERC) sent its second DC-8 mission aloft Friday with a record 176,000-pound payload of scientific equipment and experiments.
"This is a critical mission that will be watched by scientists around the world," said Dr. Hanwant B. Singh, a chemical engineer who heads the atmospheric research group at NASA's (the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's) Ames Research Center. Sing, who was awarded NASA's Exceptional Achievement Medal last year, is the lead mission scientist on the UND-NASA DC-8 project.
Singh said the DC-8's UND-based missions are part of the largest-ever airborne atmospheric research series; it involves researchers, aircraft, and instruments from all over the world and will require cutting-edge computing power to analyze the avalanche of data gathered from the various missions.
"We want to answer vital questions about how humans affect the environment," said Singh during a recent presentation at UND's John D. Odegard School of Aerospace Sciences about the DC-8's mission. "The DC-8 is a big platform that can hold lots of equipment. It's an ideal flying lab that we use, along with several other aircraft flying at different altitudes, to collect complex data about the atmosphere and pollutants in it."
NSERC director Rick Shetter said the DC-8 aerial research lab - which is under a five-year contract to UND from NASA - departed the Grand Forks Air Force Base Friday on its second mission since arriving at UND last fall. NSERC is part of the UND Center for People and the Environment. Center director George Seielstad was instrumental in bringing the DC-8 to UND.
Aboard the DC-8 on its record-setting second mission are 20 research instruments from scientific teams at UND (Shetter is operating a scanning actinic flux spectroradiometer) and several other top U.S. universities-including New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Hawaii, Penn State, California Berkeley, California Irvine, and Georgia Tech - as well as from three NASA centers and the National Center for Atmospheric Research.
This mission, dubbed the Intercontinental Chemical Transport Experiment (INTEX), will track and characterize airborne pollutants from Mexico City and Asia.
Singh said during his UND presentation that international interest in this major mission is high because the chemicals and aerosols emitted by vehicles, factories, power plants, and other modern technologies circulate worldwide with serious public health and environmental consequences. According to Singh, who also is executive editor of the international journal Atmospheric Environment, the INTEX mission will measure several air quality and climate effects of air pollution.
The DC-8 will fly first to Houston, where it will be based until March 22. From there it will fly sorties to trace pollution plumes that flow out of Mexico City. The multiple measurements made on the DC-8 will be combined with those made from other aircraft flying at different altitudes. The combined data from all the aircraft are also synthesized with data from NASA satellites.
On April 17 the UND-NASA DC-8 and its team of scientists move to Honolulu to study the chemicals and particles traveling from Asia to North America; the aircraft moves to Anchorage between April 30 and May 15 to collect plumes from the same sources in Asia as they approach North America.
The INTEX mission is the second UND has operated with the DC-8. The first was the spectacularly successful mission to record the re-entry of the Stardust capsule, which returned comet dust samples to Earth following a seven-year voyage (a video of the capture can be viewed at http://www.umac.org).
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