A collaboration between Air New Zealand and NASA has finally taken flight.
The project that uses a 50 seat domestic aircraft to gather data for NASA’s CYGNSS mission is the first time a commercial aviator has collaborated with the American space agency.
The carefully planned project has taken more than two years to come to fruition.
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Preparations included a major engineering project at Air New Zealand’s maintenance base in Auckland where a NASA satellite receiver was fitted under the floor of a Q300 turboprop aircraft.
During flight, the satellite receiver collects land and sea data at relatively low altitudes. When the plane lands the data is fed into NASA’s Cyclone Global Navigation Satellite System (CYGNSS).
“It’s great to be able to use our planes,” says Hannah Cameron, First Officer on the first Q300 flight. “We go to many New Zealand destinations so really excited to have that information used for science.”
The data from the Air New Zealand flights will extend CYCNSS’s mission to monitor environmental changes over land. The onboard information gathered over the ocean measures wind speeds to help predict hurricanes and cyclone.
“We’ll also be able to look at the long term changes for indications of things like climate change, sea level rise and coastal changes,” says Professor Delwyn Moller who is leading the project. “It will be really valuable information for Regional Councils’ planning, certainly in terms of seeing resiliency and helping inform practice in terms of climate change.”
NASA’s CYGNSS mission is a constellation of eight small data gathering satellites. Dr Will McCarty, Programme Scientist in NASA’s Earth Science Division, says the satellite receiver on the Air New Zealand Q300 has advanced capabilities with the potential to be used for future space bound missions.
“So we’re excited to test these out,” Dr McCarty says.
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