Transcripts of Nansen_gap_final

NASA's Operation IceBridge flew our first science flight of the 2015 Arctic season on Thursday, March 19th. We call this flight the Sea Ice Nansen Gap flight, and it covers a very interesting area of sea ice just to the north of the Fram Strait, which is the wide waterway separating Greenland from the Svalbard archipelago just north of Europe. One of the most interesting aspects of this mission was the overflight of an icebound Norwegian research vessel, called the Lance. The Lance was intentionally allowed to freeze into the pack ice just north of Svalbard several weeks ago earlier in the season, and where they conduct a wide-ranging array of scientific experiments. One of those experiments was done in conjunction with us. And required us to overfly the ship and a surveyed field just adjacent to the ship a couple of times. This is quite a challenging process for us because the ship is moving with the ice -- it's like hitting a moving target. And so we received regular position updates on the ship as we flew along via our satellite phone connection and we were able to target our overflight of the ship very accurately. We conducted two overflights of exactly the area we wanted to after our very sharp-eyed pilots spotted the marked survey field next to the vessel. All went extraordinarily well.