Operation IceBridge – NASA's aerial survey of polar ice expands its Arctic reach for first time

Image credits: NASA/Nathan Kurtz

New Delhi: NASA's Operation IceBridge that conducts aerial surveys of polar ice for the past eight years has produced unprecedented three-dimensional views of Arctic and Antarctic ice sheets.

The mission has provided scientists with valuable data on how polar ice is changing in a warming world.

Now, for the first time, NASA says the mission in its ninth year is expanding its reach to explore the Arctic’s Eurasian Basin through two research flights based out of Svalbard, a Norwegian archipelago in the northern Atlantic Ocean.

“This is IceBridge’s ninth year in the Arctic and we’re expecting this to be one of our most extensive campaigns to date,” said Nathan Kurtz, Operation IceBridge’s project scientist and a sea ice scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “We are expanding our reach to the Eurasian sector of the Arctic, so we’re hopefully going to get more sea ice coverage than we ever have.”

Scientists believe the addition of Svalbard will allow the mission to collect data on sea ice and snow in a scarcely measured section of the Arctic Ocean and its surrounding seas, along with measurements of a few glaciers in the Svalbard archipelago.

As per NASA, the mission is surveying the region as part of its 2017 Arctic spring campaign, which completed its first flight on March 9 and will continue until May 12.

Supporting NASA’s upcoming Ice, Cloud, and land Elevation Satellite-2 (ICESat-2) mission is one of the primary goals for Operation IceBridge.

Having precise measurements of snow on sea ice is essential for ICESat-2, which is scheduled to launch in 2018.

This year, the IceBridge team and instruments will be again flying on NASA’s P-3 Orion, which had been unavailable for the past two years while it was being fitted with new wings. The mission’s most essential instrument, the laser altimeter, has also been upgraded.

The main objective of Operation IceBridge is to collect data on changing polar land and sea ice and maintain continuity of measurements between ICESat missions. The mission is currently funded until 2019.