NASA hosted a Google+ Hangout news conference on Tuesday, Oct. 29 to share information about Operation IceBridge’s upcoming airborne field campaign in Antarctica.
IceBridge is a multi-year NASA science mission to study ice conditions at both poles. The mission’s survey flights gather data on changes in ice elevation and thickness and measure the shape of bedrock and water cavities beneath ice using a suite of scientific instruments. The mission provides critical measurements that bridge the gap between observations supplied by NASA’s Ice, Cloud and Land Elevation Satellite, or ICESat, and the upcoming ICESat-2. This is the first year IceBridge will operate directly from Antarctica, flying from McMurdo Station starting in mid-November instead of from southern Chile. This change will allow IceBridge researchers to survey parts of Antarctica previously unavailable to them since the mission began in 2009.
Panelists for the briefing were:
— Michael Studinger, IceBridge project scientist, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
— Christy Hansen, IceBridge project manager, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
— Chad Naughton, project manager, National Science Foundation’s U.S. Antarctic Program, Centennial, Colo.
