[music] Narrator: Operation IceBridge has arrived
at Thule Air Base to kick off this year’s survey of Arctic sea ice
and the ice sheets and glaciers of Greenland. But just a week ago
they were still at Wallops Flight Facility outfitting a brand new aircraft
for the trip.Actually the NASA C-130
four-engine turboprop cargo plane has seen five decades of service,
but it’s a new aircraft to IceBridge. With its distinctive nose,
elevated cockpit, and open cabin, it’s a change of pace for the team,
but functionally, it’s built to do the job.
Sonntag: Yeah, so the C-130 it's an interesting aircraft … Again this one for us is a new airplane.
It's about my age, actually, but Wallops just got it about a year ago.
First time we've installed in it. It has some advantages, some disadvantages
over the P-3 that we normally take to Greenland. Pretty similar performance really. Roughly similar range roughly similar
ground speed, maneuverability characteristics that sort of thing.
Narrator: For the past few months, the Wallops and IceBridge teams have been busy
making sure the aircraft is properly configured for the mission’s many laser,
radar, and photographic instruments.
Sonntag: That was a long road -- it's always a big deal putting all these instruments -- there's a whole suite of them on board
what to us is a new airplane. A lot of design work, a lot of machining, a lot of cutting
of metal, a lot of re-designing and re-machine work and re-cutting of metal
when the first one doesn't always work out like we hoped.
Once we're modularized and designed into the system it'll be pretty easy, but the first time is hard
and that's what's been an issue with this particular deployment because all
all of our optical instruments have to be machined to fit to look out a
particular viewport in the bottom. All the wiring has to work.
The equipment you see behind me here which is precise navigation equipment
which helps us put the airplane directly underneath the satellite path
or directly over one of our previous paths from IceBridge all that has to be wired into the system,
tested, flight-tested and that's what we're in the process of doing now.
Narrator: One week later, with all test flights a success,
IceBridge is now 6,000 miles to the north, already has its first flight in the books,
and will be flying out of Greenland and Fairbanks, Alaska for the next two months.
[music]