This short documentary is much more realistic than NASA's phony balony ISS and Space Shuttle (defunct) program. I like the pace of the documentary. Felix has been feeding me extra information useful to my mission and he pointed me to IceBridge. I looked it up and found this video. When you watch it-- ask yourself-- what the heck are they doing so much research for? It seems like something important is going is going on. I suppose all of this is funded from within NASA-- but I've never heard debate in Congress over funding NASA for Antarctica. Besides, what the heck is a SPACE agency doing researching Antarctica? Shouldn't they be in "space"? I dunno. This video blows my mind-- and I'm not smoking medical marijuana (yet).
Wow - NASA Mission to Antarctica! Well we know about other NASA "missions", don't we?
ReplyDeleteIceBridge does also include study of the North Pole....here's a nice synopsis
http://nspires.nasaprs.com/external/viewrepositorydocument/cmdocumentid=448046/solicitationId=%7BD88DE691-2735-F962-4DE6-8B7A68C34EE0%7D/viewSolicitationDocument=1/A.15%20IceBridge.pdf
IceBridge (http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/icebridge/index.html) is a NASA airborne mission making altimetry, radar, and other geophysical measurements to monitor and characterize major portions of the Earth’s cryosphere. The IceBridge mission began in 2009 and is currently planned to continue until 2019.
The Earth’s cryosphere is in a period of rapid change. Understanding these changes, their causes, and impacts are critically important to understanding the Earth as a global system. Data collected under the IceBridge program has improved our knowledge of the contribution of the world’s major ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica to sea level rise and is making fundamental contributions to understanding changes occurring in the extent and thickness of the polar sea ice.
IceBridge is managed by the project office at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC). The mission is guided by recommendations from the IceBridge Science Team, membership for which is solicited separately. Research using IceBridge observations is also solicited separately and is supported at NASA by the following programs: Cryospheric Sciences, Interdisciplinary Sciences; IceBridge Research; Studies with ICESat and CryoSat-2; and Sea Level Change....
...FY 2017 through FY 2019. During this period, IceBridge will predominantly consist of two major airborne data collection campaigns per year; with one in the Antarctic and another in the Arctic in their respective spring seasons to get an assessment of yearly changes in elevation and make other geophysical measurements relevant to assessing change in the major polar ice sheets on land and sea. These missions will be flown using the NASA DC-8 and NASA P-3. Solicited proposals for these campaigns are only to supply the instrumentation to be used on those flights. The flights costs, mission details, and management will be handled separately by NASA through its IceBridge Project Office. Proposals should be to supply and operate the instrumentation and deliver the data to the NASA Distributed Active Archive Center (DAAC) at National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC).
This award relates to the third and last phase - budget USD 7.5m in first year. I guess NASA will have a monopoly on all the data which scentists around the world will have access to - a bit like moon rock I guess.