2008 Annual Report - NASA Airborne Science Program

Figure 25
NOVICE instrument payload.
(UAVs), such as the NASA Global Hawk. A
few additional, mature instruments were also
flown to capture some of the same chemical
species for intercomparison measurements.
With the emphasis of the mission being
on functional and performance testing,
NOVICE allowed the investigators to focus
on the engineering and intercomparison
components rather than achieving highquality
scientific data and results. This helped
these teams elucidate anomalous instrument
behaviors, such as offsets, drifts, vibrations,
and transient phenomena that cannot always
be duplicated in the labs.
type of innovative test program provides a
link between the technology development
programs and the actual flight experiments
normally performed by NASA. It enables
the science instruments to undergo the flight
testing required to give these instruments the
requisite reliability and accuracy needed for
future NASA Earth Science process studies.
NOVICE may, in fact, be the prototype for
future similar flight opportunites. Dr. Jim
Podolske of NASA Ames was the Project
Scientist, and the overall mission was
managed by ESPO.
URL: http://www.espo.nasa.gov/novice
Three sorties with a total of 11.3 hours were
flown during the NOVICE experiment. This
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