Data collected by IceBridge helped scientists bridge the gap in polar observations of ice height between NASA's Ice, Cloud and Land Elevation Satellite (ICESat), which launched in 2003, and ICESat-2, which launched on September 15, 2018. ICESat stopped collecting science data in 2009, making IceBridge critical for ensuring a continuous series of observations. IceBridge surveyed the Arctic and Antarctic areas once a year, typically in the springtime before summer melting began. The first Operation IceBridge flights were conducted in March/May 2009 over Greenland and in October/November 2009 over Antarctica. Other smaller airborne surveys around the world, in particular Alaska, were also part of the IceBridge mission.
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The surveys were conducted from NASA’s DC-8 airborne science laboratory and periodically NASA's GV, or P3-Orion aircraft. The DC-8, managed by NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center in Palmdale, California, carried IceBridge’s full instrument suite.
A large portion of the data was collected by IceBridge from 2009 through 2012. One of the mission's scientific instruments, the Multichannel Coherent Radar Depth Sounder, operated by the Center for the Remote Sensing of Ice Sheets at the University of Kansas, can see through vast layers of ice to measure its thickness and the shape of bedrock below.
This is a narrated version of an visualization that can be found, along with more detailed information, at