2008 Annual Report - NASA Airborne Science Program

NASA
P-3
The P-3B Orion is based at
Goddard Space Flight Center’s
(GSFC) Wallops Flight Facility.
The P-3 participated in two major
deployment missions during FY08 and two
instrument development missions.
The first instrument development mission
was a series of local flights from Wallops
for the Johns Hopkins APL Geostationary
Imaging Fabry-Perot Spectrometer (GIFS).
The DFRC Research Environment for
Vehicle Embedded Analysis on Linux
(REVEAL) and the P-3 Aircraft Data
System (PDS) on-board data systems were
also tested during this flight series.
The first major deployment of the year
was the spring phase of the ARCTAS
mission (see page 9). All mission objectives
were met with a total of 72.9 flight hours
in support of the spring deployment.
The second major deployment of the
year was the ARCTAS – Summer 2008
phase, a follow-on mission to the spring
phase. The focus of the summer mission
was the study of boreal forest fire aerosol
emissions. In conjunction with the ARCTAS
Summer deployment, a flight in support of
the California Air Resources Board (CARB)
was completed. A total of 98.1 flight hours
were flown in support of the ARCTAS-
Summer and CARB programs.
The fourth and final mission for FY08
was the Soil Moisture Active-Passive
– Validation Experiment 2008 (SMAP-
VEX’08). Two NASA L-Band Radiometers
were tested and flown on the P-3 for
a soil moisture study on the Delmarva
Peninsula, conducted in conjunction with a
USDA in-situ data collection and JPL PALS
instrument flights. The mission successfully
flew 20.9 science hours.
A major upgrade to the P-3 in FY08 was
the implementation of a real-time air to
ground data communication system, and
which played a particularly important role
during the summer phase of ARCTAS. This
system is comprised of two parts. The
REVEAL system, provided by the Dryden
Flight Research Center, is a 6-channel
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