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NASA's Operation IceBridge flew our first science flight of the 

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2015 Arctic season on Thursday, March 19th.

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We call this flight the Sea Ice Nansen Gap flight, and it covers a very interesting

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area of sea ice just to the north of the Fram Strait, which is the wide waterway

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separating Greenland from the Svalbard archipelago just north of Europe.

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One of the most interesting aspects of this mission was the overflight of an icebound

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Norwegian research vessel, called the Lance.

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The Lance was intentionally allowed to freeze into the pack ice just north of Svalbard several weeks ago

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earlier in the season, and where they conduct a wide-ranging

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array of scientific experiments. One of those experiments was done in conjunction with us. 

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And required us to overfly the ship and

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a surveyed field just adjacent to the ship a couple of times. This is quite 

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a challenging process for us because the ship is moving with the ice -- it's like hitting a moving target.

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And so we received regular position updates

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on the ship as we flew along via our satellite phone connection

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and we were able to target our overflight of the ship very accurately.

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We conducted two overflights of exactly the area we wanted to

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after our very sharp-eyed pilots spotted the marked survey field next to 

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the vessel. All went extraordinarily well.