by Jane Houston Jones
The three days before November 19th were a blur of getting from here to there and from there to somewhere else while staying on local (California) time. We slept by day and worked by night. After the test flight on day 1, we all had alot of work to do to prepare for Leonid night. There were 12 teams comprised of 34 researchers aboard the NASA DC-8 Airborne Laboratory and about the same number of instruments with 14 researchers aboard the modified USAF KC-135 known as FISTA, the Flying Infrared Signature Technology Aircraft. The days and nights passed so quickly - we saw each other sometimes at meals, or in hotel check-in lines, or on busses to or from the flight lines. We met for a brew or a bowling ball in Nebraska or chocolate and churros in Madrid. But most of our time together was in the dark of the aircraft. I tried to interview each group aboard the DC-8. I found the research so interesting that I am sharing a short description of the equipment here. For more information, including many of the researcher's webpages go here: http://leonid.arc.nasa.gov/the_scientists.html
IMCU - International Meteor Counting Unit. That's my group! Eight observers counted meteors by mouse clicks. We wore i-goggles, which received video from videocameras aimed out optical glass windows, some cameras capturing the horizon to 30 degrees, and others from 30 to 60 degrees. There was one all-sky camera too. The camera field of view varied but we mostly looked at a 40 by 30 degree piece of sky. Our group included Pete Gural, who has designed Meteorscan software for SAIC, Oregonian Chris Crawford, ALPO meteor coordinator Bob Lunsford, meteor observer Dave Holman, college math major Dave Nugent, and Jane and Morris Jones - who wrote the software we used in 2001 and 2002. The ESA camera and operator were also part of our flux measurement team. A team from the Dutch Meteor Society met rain in Spain, and moved locations at the last minute to southeast Spain. Another group observed from Mt. Lemmon in Arizona using the same meteor counting software as we did.
ESA - the European Space Agency provided a camera to help calibrate fluxes in comparison with ground-based measurements in Spain - this camera was also used by the IMCU team.
ALLSKY - 140 degree field of view, a videocamera mounted in a little dome - amazing especially on storm night.. This camera was also used by the IMCU team.
AIRGLOW - The University of Utah contributed a sensitive near-IR camera for spectrally filtered measurements of meteors and trains at visible and near infrared wavelengths to investigate their signatures and dynamics. In addition they utilized a novel imaging study of the longitudinal variability of the OH mesospheric airglow emission and studied atmospheric wave structure and source distributions.
ASTRO - SETI contributed a cooled CCD spectrograph for meteor composition and a slit spectrograph coupled to an automatic meteor tracker for visible and near-IR spectroscopy
AIM-IT - A NASA HQ contractor contributed an automatic meteor tracker - a computerized high speed optical tracking system that allows high resolution imaging of meteors using two cameras - one each with a wide and narrow field of view.
AZUR - Airborne Submillimeter Radiometer. The University of Bremen, Germany brought a high resolution radio receiver, probing the rational sub-mm emissions of small molecules HCN, NO, O3, HCI and H2CO. The detector is a superconducting diode that is located in a dewar filled with liquid helium and liquid nitrogen. The liquid helium has a temperature of about 4 K (about -269° C), only at these temperatures the superconduction is possible. The liquid nitrogen (about 77 Kelvin, -196° C) is needed as a heat buffer between the liquid helium temperature and the ambient temperature. It was alot of fun while they poured the cyro
HFRI - The University of Alaska brought a high framerate imager that captured last year's spectacular bow-shock features of a meteor using a digital, low-light-level, 1000 frame per second intensified CCD imager. They also brought a high speed photometer.
UEA - University of East Anglia installed a slit spectrometer with a small telescope assembly. They looked at meteor trains and airglow.
HDTV - Scientists from the Japanese ISAS operated an intensified High Definition TV camera for ultraviolet meteor spectroscopy. They also had equipment on the other aircraft.
SPAIN - The Spanish Astrobiology Institute contributed a CCD camera which attempts to detect the atomic lines of carbon in meteors and compare these measurements to the abundance of the chemical elements in direct studies of meteorites.
STUDIO - the NASA Ames video studio. Eight monitors sample the output of various cameras and offered a great overview of what was going on outside. This was a better show than any multiplex theatre. Every show was a winner! They also had equipment on the other aircraft.
I wanted to interview each group aboard the FISTA, too, but didn't have time. FISTA has 20 upward looking windows which can be fitted with a variety of glass such as BK7, fused quartz, pyrex and float glass, just like the DC-8. Other window ports support mid-IR research. The instruments and research can be found here
http://leonid.arc.nasa.gov/layoutFISTA.html
Researchers from the USA, Canada Czech Republic and Japan manned a dozen pieces of equipment. One unique experiment called "DUST" utilized sticky tape in a periscope to collect a small piece of meteoritic debris in the hours following the 04h Leonid peak.
I hope this gives you an idea of why the mission is called the Leonid Multi-Instrument Aircraft Campaign. 50 researchers, from seven countries brought together to observe the 2002 Leonids from above the clouds.
Next: Day 6 and 7 - the 2002 Leonids and the Aurora Borealis from 39,000 feet http://leonid.arc.nasa.gov/index.html