NASA - National Aeronautics and Space Administration

Mission: Foundation - Support Force 34 (priority: high)

This flight is a new design, one of a suite of four flights designed to sample the bedrock, sub-ice shelf bathymetry and surface topography of the Foundation and Support Force ice streams on a 20-40 km grid. This flight combines the earlier Foundation-Support Force 03 and 04 concepts into a single flight, eliminating coverage of Support Force. It extends coverage previously acquired closer to the grounding line, downstream toward the Ronne Ice Shelf.

Weather today continued to be extremely poor across most of West Antarctica, the Bellingshausen and Weddell Seas, and somewhat poor - and worsening during the day - over the Peninsula.  The polar plateau was also partially covered in cloud.  This left the Ronne/Filchner drainage as our only viable science target for today.  We selected this mission because it was the highest-priority flight with suitable weather.  Our weather models all suggested this flight would see clear skies, but this assessment was confirmed by a last-moment Terra/MODIS (NASA Rapidfire) imagery pass.  The imagery from this pass became available to us just a few minutes before our go/no-go decision had to be made.  Our expectation that this scenario could happen, with our only reliable high-resolution imagery source (MODIS), is what led us to move our schedule later by one hour.  Today's sequence of events nicely illustrated the reason behind that schedule change.

All instruments performed well.  The DMS primary camera experienced a failure while on the data line, but the operators switched to the backup camera within a few seconds, resulting in a minimal loss of data.

We conducted a ramp pass at 1200' on departure, to ensure good illumination of the DMS calibration targets.

Data volumes:
AIRGrav: 5 Gb
ATM: 21 Gb
CAMBOT: 8 Gb
DMS: 50 Gb
FLIR: 8 Gb
Ku-Band Radar: 343 Gb
MCoRDS: 1.3 Tb
Narrow Swath ATM: 20 Gb
Snow Radar: 343 Gb

total data collection time: 3.7 hrs