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(Sound of jet engine taking off)

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Narrator: NASA is sending a research aircraft high

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above the Pacific Ocean to study a region of the

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atmosphere near the equator that is extremely

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important to regulating the Earth's climate.

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The deployment to Andersen Air Force Base in Guam

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is part of a multi-year NASA airborne science

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campaign called the Airborne Tropical Tropopause

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Experiment or ATTREX Mission.

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Managed by NASA Ames Research Center, the ATTREX

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Mission will fly a Global Hawk aircraft to collect

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data within the upper atmosphere.

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The unmanned Global Hawk is based at NASA's Dryden

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Flight Research Center in California, and can fly

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at tropical tropopause altitudes of about 65,000

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feet for flights lasting up to 30 hours.

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Lenny Pfister: What this gives us is an ability to

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reach places that we can't reach and maybe more

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importantly, you know, if we found a phenomenon

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that we're interested in studying, we could stay

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there and look at it in detail

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for quite a few hours.

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Narrator: The goal of the ATTREX Mission is to use

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this data to improve our understanding of the

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physical processes that occur in our atmosphere

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and help to make better predictions about climate

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changes in the future.