PoSSUM Successfully Captures Noctilucent Cloud Data from Research Aircraft
PoSSUM Flight crew consisting of Mission Specialist Casey Stedman, payload specialist Dr. Shawna Pandya, and pilot Dr. Jason Reimuller on a sortie to investigate NLC structures.
Last July, a team of 17 Project PoSSUM team scientists and scientistastronaut candidates spent two weeks in the remote town of High Level in northern Alberta, Canada as part of a flight research team that was deployed to study noctilucent clouds from a research aircraft and two ground stations, each specially equipped with scientific camera systems. These rare clouds form in polar regions at altitudes of 50 miles and are believed to be sensitive indicators of man-made climate change and good proxies of low-density atmospheres such as that of Mars. The cameras will later be used for a high-altitude balloon campaign over Antarctica in December to study these clouds and later to fly through them in manned suborbital spacecraft, such as Virgin Galactic’s Spaceship Two.
On each night, PoSSUM teams deployed to two ground stations: the ‘High Level’ station in the town of High Level, and the ‘Wood Buffalo’ station, located 200km to the east by the Wood Buffalo National Park. From 24
June to 8 July, a total of six sorties were flown along carefully-constructed flight plans to altitudes of 21,000ft; the rare clouds were observed on four of these flights and the data obtained was coordinated with data observed by PoSSUM teams at two remote ground stations. By carefully coordinating the flights with two ground stations, the team hopes to build tomography or three-dimensional images of the fine internal structures of the clouds from which turbulence and instabilities in the upper atmosphere may be better understood. Much of what the PoSSUM astronautcandidates have learned during their initial PoSSUM training was applied to this first field campaign. Flying at 23,000 feet in an unpressurized research aircraft is a challenging proposition and mission team members must be keenly aware of the effects of hypoxia. Flights will also require precise navigation, effective communications and crew resource management techniques, as well as an intimate knowledge of the cameras and their control systems.