2008 Annual Report - NASA Airborne Science Program
2008 Annual Report - NASA Airborne Science Program
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 />
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