LJWorld.com

Kids love to fly.

And it was the thrill of flight that lured thousands of youngsters and their parents who came to the USA Science and Engineering Expo Saturday in Washington, D.C., to the booth created by the NSF Center for Remote Sensing of Ice Sheets, headquartered at Kansas University.

What brought them in like a carnival midway barker was the brightly colored airplane held aloft by scaffolding. A stuffed Jayhawk toy sat inside the cockpit, but really the kids were in control.

More than a quarter of a million people are expected to stroll through the Expo displays Saturday and Sunday at the National Mall and nearby areas and try their hand at the interactive fun. The National Science Foundation-funded center was the sole exhibit from the Sunflower State. The center creates new tools and technologies to study changes in the world’s polar ice, and is known for its expertise in radars and unmanned aerial vehicles or UAVs.

The CReSIS booth let visitors guide the meter-long plane, outfitted with radar, over a specially prepared “glacier” made of foam layers. The radar would present a real-time image of the glacier, showing the glacier’s thickness, its layers and the bedrock below.

Austin Arnett, an electrical engineering graduate student at KU and graduate research assistant at CReSIS, explained the significance of understanding a glacier’s layers to hundreds of visitors during his shift.

“Each year you can kind of get an idea of how much snow fell, how thick it is, how dense it is and if there’s any water running through the snow. We can get an idea of how much ice is there, currently, and how much was there last year, the year before and the year before so you can tell if it’s increasing or decreasing in size based on these radar measurements.”

Visitors also could learn how to control an RC plane through a flight simulator. The center uses the system to train pilots before sending them out to the field with one-of-a-kind aircraft they’ve developed to carry radars in harsh arctic climates.

“It’s unmanned. It flies itself on autopilot. The takeoff and landing are actually done by a person,” explained Bill Donovan, an aerospace engineering doctoral student and CReSIS graduate researcher.

Through the course of the day, CReSIS staff gave out hundreds of Jayhawk pins, paper airplanes, face tattoos and thousands of pens from partner institution Elizabeth City State University in North Carolina.

Kids lined up four and five deep for their turn at the flight simulator. The chance to fly a plane was the star of the day and was an opportunity to introduce children to loftier ideas, such as how to use aircraft for scientific discovery.

Like most children, these kids were born engineers. They dove into devices without waiting for instructions. They just started doing. The devices had to be durable, too, because kids put every ounce of energy they had into pushing buttons, knobs and levers to make the plane “fly” from one end of the booth to the other or to perform aerobatic maneuvers on the simulator.

At day’s end it was clear, that whether it’s atop their daddy’s shoulders or behind an RC controller of a flight simulator, the art and act of flying elicits smiles and shouts of joy from children.

Sustainable Energy Shines Briefly

Tiny solar powered racers from another university stole the show early Saturday morning, when the video monitors and computers of this tech-heavy alley of Expo overloaded the delicate power system. The balsa wood cars, small enough to be held in a man’s hand, would zip through the corridor only to sputter to a stop in the shadows. Of course, after power was restored and thousands and thousands of visitors packed the lane, the racers retreated to their home booth for safety. The sun was still shining, but there was no place to run.

Wednesday’s mission was a chance for the University of Kansas’ SNOW and Ku-Band radars to shine. NASA’s Operation Ice Bridge leaders took advantage of favorable weather patterns and made the rapidly disappearing sea ice the target of the day.

“This is a first-time mission,” said Seelye Martin, the research leader for OIB and a professor of oceanography at University of Washington. "This is the first time this will have been done in the Amundsen Sea. The Amundsen Sea is particularly critical because it’s losing sea ice. … It’s actually a reduction in sea ice and it’s right up against the Pine Island and Thwaites glaciers. This is part of the overall climate study of the glacial response so it should be a very interesting mission.”

The SNOW and Ku-band radars, developed through the NSF Center for Remote Sensing of Ice Sheets headquartered at KU, operate at higher frequencies and work to identify very fine structures such as snow on top of sea ice. Knowing the thickness of the snow on the ice will help researchers determine the thickness of just the ice and then allow them to better gauge changes in that thickness, Martin said.

As data was collected researchers took turns gawking out the DC-8 windows. Flying at 250 miles per hour and only 1,600 feet above sea level, the view was impressive. Immense sheets of ice roughly 50 meters tall and seemingly as flat as a pool table floated freely under the aircraft. The stereotypical iceberg, poking it’s pointy top through the surface of the water, was petite in comparison and in the minority this day. Thin looking sheets of ice with numerous fracture lines were far more common, followed by the large floating ice barges. Near Thurston Island, the continent of Antarctica cast out a string of gargantuan ice pearls fit for a titan.

The ever-changing frigid seascape kept crew and researchers captivated for most of the 11-hour flight. Seeing the shadow of the seemingly miniaturized jet cast upon the surface of the ice helped everyone gauge the enormity of the region and the mission.

Interesting note of the region:

Punta Arenas doesn’t have parking meters. They have parking people.

Throughout the city, visitors can here the slightly pleasant, slightly annoying chirping of electronic devices. As eyes scan to find the source of the noise, one will see young men standing, sometimes sitting, along the street with an electronic device in hand. These are the parking meters.

The men wait for motorists to pull up to the curb on their street, charge them the parking fee and give them a parking receipt for the windshield. If a motorist manages to park without paying, the parking watchdog will wait for the motorist to return to the vehicle and block their egress until the fee is remitted.

Success can happen just about anywhere.

Tuesday's high-altitude flight took NASA's Operation Ice Bridge researchers over the Pine Island region (75° 25' S and 98° 25' W and surrounding area) of Antarctica.

"We're really pumped. We're getting some really good data," Professor Chris Allen says about midway through the 11-hour flight. The University of Kansas electrical engineering professor and four KU graduate students are operating three different radars developed at KU through the NSF Center for Remote Sensing of Ice Sheets.

"A while back, we were over the ice shelf, and it was very distinct." Now, as the plane progresses over the land formation, the vibrant multicolored display offers less clear information. But the raw data is still being captured. "That's where the signal processing comes in," Allen says. The display offers a cactus-like spectrum of color, with spikes protruding from separate layers of color. The uninitiated eye can clearly see a "surface" in the image. That would be the top of the ice layer, Allen explains. The more trained eye knows that where the yellow, aqua and blue colors intermingle is where the real action lies and more sophisticated methods will be needed to coax meaning from the mountains of raw data.

Already the CReSIS team is eliciting oohs and ahhs from other science team members through data they've collected with the MCoRDS radar in the mission's two previous flights. In a recent evening briefing, an image being displayed for all to see appeared to show that in one inland area of Antarctica the ice sheet is several kilometers thick and is nestled in a channel of bedrock that appears to be well below sea level.

Five hours after the flight started, the plane has gone through several passes and still has many more to go. The proscribed flight path — called "mowing the lawn" — includes 11 parallel lines and a couple perpendicular ones. Each parallel path is about five miles apart, however the flight crew skips the adjacent path in order to comfortably make the turn. A couple "teardrop turns" — wider turns that loop back nearly 360 degrees to a narrower path — have been thrown in for good measure to ensure the science and engineering teams are on the exact positions they need. It also helps break the monotony of flying over endless tracks of white.

Even after the flight crew has maneuvered the DC-8 through its perpendicular labyrinth and is making the long stretch home across the Antarctic Ocean, the KU team will still be hard at work crunching numbers and distilling hard truths from the icebergs of raw data. With significant computing power aboard the plane, the team has made it a goal try to deliver detailed information about ice sheet thickness and more by the time the plane lands in Punta Arenas.

Interesting note of the region: Yes, we have no bananas. Chile is a grape, berry and avocado haven, but there are many fruits and vegetables you won't find in grocery stores, especially in a hard to reach area like Punta Arenas. Paul Watzlavick, press officer for the U.S. ambassador to Chile, points out that bananas are not native to Chile and they don't suffer the long journey south very well. He adds that while shoppers might find dried beans in Punta Arenas, canned beans won't be found. They are too heavy to be shipped inexpensively.

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PUNTA ARENAS, Chile — What they say of Kansas is true of Punta Arenas, Chile. If you don’t like the weather, stick around 10 minutes. NASA Operation Ice Bridge flight for Monday, Oct. 19, was scrubbed due to the weather.

The skies were clear over Antarctica and plans were well under way for a 10 a.m. local time take off, but dense, wet snowflakes that stuck to everything at the airport put a different spin on preparations.

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Operation Ice Bridge continues a multi-year series of measurements of changes in polar ice sheets and sea ice started by NASA’s ICESat satellite. The primary focus of the day’s mission was a high-altitude flight, 30,000 feet over the Antarctic peninsula using the LVIS -- Laser Vegetation Imaging Sensor –- which measures the surface elevation of the ice sheet. Several other instruments, including the MCoRDS radar system from the University of Kansas, also would be able to collect data during this particular flight. The MCoRDs can tell earth scientists how thick the ice sheets are and what the ice rests on. Two other radars developed at KU’s Center for Remote Sensing of Ice Sheets, the SNOW radar that measures snow thickness on sea ice and the Ku-band radar, must collect data at low altitude (1,500 to 2,000 feet above the surface).

In the preflight briefing this morning, researchers and NASA’s DC-8 flight crew discussed different deicing methods and how those methods might affect the delicate instruments or interfere with necessary data collection prior to take off. Several instruments have sensors on the aircraft’s exterior. The crew also worked to ascertain what deicing methods were available at the Carlos Ibanez del Campo Airport in Punta Arenas.

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Turns out they only use brooms to deice here.

The heavy nature of the snow, its horizontal flight path, the unbroken cloud cover and the uncertainty of when this particular snowfall would end led to a decision to scrub the flight.

Two hours later, the constant high winds typical of the region had cleared most of the clouds, and only the snow in the foothills surrounding the city remained.

The researchers and flight crew will meet at 6 p.m. this evening to look at weather forecasts, identify mission objectives and determine a possible flight path if signs are favorable to fly on Tuesday.

The team has been able to complete two of its 17 scheduled flights. The Operation Ice Bridge DC-8 deployment to Punta Arenas will end Nov. 21, regardless of whether all 17 flights have been completed.

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Interesting note of the region: Dogs are everywhere in Punta Arenas, Chile. Stray dogs have the run of the town. They are a little scruffy, extremely friendly and always ready for a handout or a pat. Most of the dogs still have thick winter coats, but they don’t seem malnourished. Evidently, people feed them. They also are very cognizant of cars. This morning, a dog stepped out in the street to bark at another dog and then nimbly backed out of the way of oncoming cars in rush hour traffic. One more thing about the dogs: Not many cats around.

Jill Hummels, a KU employee, is blogging about her experience documenting a KU research trip to survey the ice sheets of Antarctica.