NASA Operation IceBridge – What It Takes To Execute a Major International Airborne Research Campaign

Research flights are underway in Thule, Greenland for the Spring 2015 campaign of NASA’s Operation IceBridge mission. IceBridge is the largest airborne survey of Earth’s polar ice ever flown. NASA scientists have been studying rapidly changing features of land and sea ice over Greenland and Antarctica since 2009, when NASA’s Ice, Cloud and Land Elevation Satellite (ICESat) stopped collecting data. Airborne measurements of polar ice will continue until a replacement satellite, ICESat-2, is launched in 2017