Our shuttles to the airport were waiting for us at 4:30AM on Monday, 21 November, as we were scheduled to report at the Clothing Distribution Center at 5:00AM. As we arrived we were instructed to ...

In early September, I drove down to Wallops Flight Facility to set up our GPS base station in preparation for the test flight. The test flight is to verify that everything is working as expected, and ...

Thurs. Feb. 7, 2013. Four Days Before Launch, Embassy Suites, Lompoc, Calif. After arriving at my hotel for my first rocket launch, I started loading up my plate at Sonny’s complimentary breakfast.

Hello and welcome to my new blog. I’m Alek Petty, a sea ice scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, currently making my way to the northern coast of Canada (a small town called Kugluktuk) to ...

The pilot not flying on mission day is called the “mobile” and helps with the flight planning, checks weather, sets up the ER-2 cockpit, does the walkaround and also drives a radio-equipped car behind ...

Today we were able to finish our first official station of NAAMES 3! Our group, the UCSB Optics team, saw a whirlwind of activity as we deployed half a dozen different instruments to begin to ...

On Thursday, August 28 th, I was able to watch AV-6 take off from Wallops Flight Facility. The black plane that you can see in the linked video is flown as an added safety precaution as it follows the ...

We are now well on our way back home again, with our GPS stations dutifully recording ice motion in our absence. Several of the stations will be visited again this summer, and all will have a visit ...

We are currently at the first station to be occupied by the fourth and final NAAMES field campaign. It is a bittersweet experience both scientifically and personally. This station represents the final ...

Clement Delcourt, Rebecca Scholten and Sander Veraverbeke (from left to right, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam) after a day of sampling in an area that burned with high severity. If only I could collect ...

“Wow, what an exciting life you lead” is a seemingly cliché response I get when the topic of what I do for a living comes up in casual conversation with strangers. I know for a fact (from having to ...

This winter, our field team of four completed the two-week 88S Traverse in Antarctica in an effort to provide the best means of assessing NASA’s ICESat-2. When you show folks pictures from the trip, ...