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DC-8

NASA's DC-8 Flying Laboratory taxis up to the ramp at Sal Island's Amilcar Cabral International Airport after a science flight for the NAMMA mission.

 
Photo Number: ED07-0041-1
Photo Date: August 26, 2006
 
Formats: 640x521 JPEG Image (178 KBytes)
1280x1041 JPEG Image (544 KBytes)
3000x2441 JPEG Image (2337 KBytes)
 
Photo
Description:
NASA's DC-8 Flying Laboratory taxis up to the ramp at Sal Island's Amilcar Cabral International Airport after a science flight for the NAMMA mission. (Ames photo # ACD06-0135-035)
 
Project
Description:
The NASA African Monsoon Multidisciplinary Analysis – or NAMMA – field campaign was conducted during the late summer and early fall in 2006 from the Cape Verde Islands, off the west coast of Africa. NASA’s DC-8 Airborne Laboratory was a major contributor to the NAMMA research missions, probing easterly atmospheric waves over the Atlantic Ocean off the African continent during numerous flights from Amilcar Cabral International Airport on Sal Island in the Cape Verdes. These easterly waves are storm systems that occasionally develop into tropical cyclones, and the main purpose of NAMMA was to find out the differences between the developing and non-developing waves.

The mission had a significant educational component as well, as students in chief NAMMA mission scientist Ed Zipser's meteorology class at the University of Utah were able to interact with one of the missions as it was being flown. Through live displays of the DC-8’s position fused with weather imagery and other meteorological essentials, students were able to view exactly what was unfolding five or six time zones away. They saw the same displays of satellite images and locations of lightning strikes that researchers aboard the DC-8 and in the operations center on the Cape Verdes were seeing. Even better, they were able to interact with those researchers via live text messaging.

The student participation was made possible through the Earth Science Capabilities Demonstration project at NASA's Dryden Flight Research Center, Edwards Air Force Base, Calif. Researchers in Dryden's Suborbital Telepresence subproject, known as Over-the-Horizon Networks, managed the network connectivity to and from the aircraft and utilized the REVEAL – Research Environment for Vehicle Embedded Analysis – system to provide aircraft status and other measured parameters.

Collaborating partners at Marshall Space Flight Center, Huntsville, Ala., added other types of information and made all of it accessible to the NAMMA research team in a package called the Real Time Mission Monitor. The monitor integrated satellite and radar imagery, lightning observations, weather model predictions and other data sets with aircraft navigation data and other information from onboard instruments. All of this was viewable in three-dimensional space and time with the user-friendly Google Earth virtual globe.

 
NASA Photo by: Bill Moede (Ames)
 
Keywords: Cape Verde Islands, Africa, DC-8 Airborne Laboratory, NAMMA, NASA African Monsoon Multidisciplinary Analysis, Amilcar Cabral International Airport, Sal Island
 


Last Modified: March 7, 2007
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