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2008 Annual Report - NASA Airborne Science Program

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NOVICE<br />

<strong>Science</strong> Focus: Atmospheric Composition<br />

Sponsor: A. Roberts, <strong>NASA</strong> HQ<br />

Location: Texas<br />

Aircraft instrument development<br />

programs can normally only<br />

fund teams to bring the<br />

maturity of an instrument to<br />

a medium technical readiness<br />

level and may not budget the flight hours<br />

required to demonstrate an instrument’s<br />

operational readiness. Often this may not<br />

include any dedicated flight hours to test<br />

the actual capability of the instrument. In<br />

an effort to help alleviate this situation, the<br />

<strong>Airborne</strong> <strong>Science</strong> <strong>Program</strong> has dedicated<br />

some flight hours for testing a payload<br />

comprised of funded instruments needing<br />

flight verification. The NewlyOperating<br />

and Validated Instruments Comparison<br />

Experiment (NOVICE) mission was put<br />

together as a series of flights for such<br />

airborne instrument testing.<br />

For the NOVICE experiment, a payload of<br />

over 14 instruments from <strong>NASA</strong>, NOAA, and<br />

several universities were flown together on<br />

the WB-57 aircraft (see Fig. 25) from Ellington<br />

Field, Texas, during the first two weeks of<br />

September <strong>2008</strong>.<br />

Many instruments either require their<br />

demonstration flights soon after construction<br />

or need additional performance assessments<br />

after major modifications. Many of the<br />

instruments flown on NOVICE are being<br />

designed and tested for future atmospheric<br />

missions flying on Unmanned Aerial Vehicles<br />

40

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