The European Space Agency’s (ESA) new CryoSat-2 satellite and a Nasa DC-8 aircraft have been linked for the Operation Ice Bridge mission to measure sea ice, verifying data collected by the satellite.
Cryosat-2, launched recently to provide data on ice on earth, used its synthetic aperture interferometric radar altimeter (SIRAL) during the joint mission.
Operation Ice Bridge is a six-year Nasa campaign using a DC-8 aircraft carrying the airborne topographic mapper laser that sends pulses of light in circular scans to the ground.
ESA and Nasa decided to use the recent opportunity of the aircraft flying over the Arctic, directly under CryoSat-2 satellite.
ESA CryoSat-2 commissioning manager Robert Cullen said SIRAL has been in excellent working order since it was switched on.
“Although we were testing SIRAL at the time, the CryoSat flight control team manually switched the instrument into its sea-ice mode for the duration of the underflight and quickly switched back to carry on our maintenance work afterwards,” he said.
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By GlobalData
