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.