NASA Studies Thunderstorms with ER-2 Aircraft

NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center collaborated with University of Bergen (Norway) to create the ALOFT (Airborne Lightning Observatory for FEGS and TGFs) project. Watch this video to see how NASA’s ER-2 aircraft, flying just above the height of thunderclouds over the Floridian and Caribbean coastlines, collected more accurate data that can advance the study of high-energy radiation emissions from thunderstorms.

Transcript

00:00:04 foreign Airborne science we study all kinds of different weather lightning is obviously a very big part first name Alistair last name Ma engineering technician slash crew chief it's very exciting to be working with the er2 my role is to design a flight campaign that can put us over thunderstorms as much as possible

00:00:36 we got to get as much as a nitrogen out of his system as possible we are hunting for gamma rays from thunderstorms known as terrestrial gamma-ray flashes so doing this research helps us learn more about how lightning or with Mother Nature [Music] we are hunting for gamma rays from thunderstorms I think scammer Rays can

00:01:13 come in two forms one are low energy uh Long Live things called glows sort of enhancements in the background radiation and then within those glows you have things known as terrestrial gamma-ray flashes or TGs and they're very powerful emissions of of radiation from thunderstorms in order to go and observe these tgfs we are using the er2 aircraft which is a high altitude high endurance

00:01:40 aircraft so it gives us the ability to fly a distance away and stay over those targets of opportunity for a good amount of time so that we can make those observations one of the first things we're going to do when we come into work is let the instrument teams get about an hour they're going to go through their instruments make sure everything's working correctly do their pre-flights

00:02:00 along with us doing our pre-flight so ice storm is an instrument to detect Damaris from these energetic events from thunderstorms what we hope to find is to understand the energy of these photons and that gives us insight into the energetic processes that happen in these gamma flashes foreign pressure the head will go up

00:02:27 and we'll pull this down or he'll pull it down while he's in the aircraft and it'll bring his head down that way you can see in the cockpit first of all we pre-flight their suits and make sure everything's good all the leak rates are with intolerance and then when the pilots come down we'll suit them up and then he has to pre-read 100 oxygen we got to get as much as the

00:02:51 nitrogen out of the system as possible that's why he's pre-breathing 100 oxygen for an hour they can develop the bends if they go up too fast bubbles will fall in your veins we're going to tow the aircraft outside we obviously need fuel which we bring our own fuel tanks for we'll fuel it and then after we've fueled it we'll take it over to the

00:03:17 launch spot after that we're gonna get the aircraft ready to go get the pilot inside in addition we're collecting validation data for a NASA lightning satellites the lightning Imaging sensor on the space station as well as the geostationary lightning mapper up on geostationary orbit with the success of being able to

00:03:47 observe tgfs on this Mission it'll be World known and the research will help people globally [Music]