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[music]

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My name is Christy Hansen, and I'm the new project manager on an airborne

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campaign for Earth science called Operation IceBridge.

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I've been working at NASA here for almost 11 to 12 years, and my whole career before IceBridge was

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all space flight related. So I worked Space Shuttle program and space station.

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And then I was looking around to try something different, and I thought, "airborne

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campaign?" "What is this, what is this Operation IceBridge?"

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And then I learned, here at NASA, it's amazing how much work is being done, using aircraft.

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So essentially what this airborne campaign does, is it flies up to nine

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different geophysical instruments installed on the aircraft so

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for part of the year up in the Arctic, up north, between March and May,

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we fly this airplane over the Greenland ice sheet, collecting data on

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the changing ice sheets, the sea ice, and the glaciers. And the idea is

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collecting data and showing over a long time series, how is the ice sheet changing,

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maybe we can find out why it's changing.

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IceBridge teams are all over the country. We have scientists, instrument managers,

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we have a data center, we have aircraft offices all over.

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So they really needed someone who could kind of bridge the gap between all those communities so,

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the work was getting done and it's a hugely successful mission, but maybe I can

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help make things efficient, help with their documentation, and things like that or ...

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so really, each day, I just I stand back and I look -- where can I help?  Because these are super smart people.

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Where can I help and not get in the way?

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It's like magic watching the teams work together. We have the aircraft team. They know what

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to do. They're keeping the plane safe. They make sure everything's configured correctly on the plane.

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The instrument teams. They're operating their laser altimiters, we have four radar systems.

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We have a magnatomer and a gravimeter. They know what to do, they're on the plane.

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So it's like a well-oiled machine, to get out there and think, look at all these teams.

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How are they working? Are they working together well? Does anyone need anything?

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And it's all coming together for a common goal of we're going to go out there, we're going to work our butts off,

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collect this data, publish this data, and ultimately learn more things about the Earth

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and maybe things we can do to understand, you know, future sea level rise or climate change.

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Yeah, so it's been pretty like a huge whirlwind

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because this is only my fifth month on the job and literally a month into it

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I flew to Greenland and supported the mission there for three weeks.

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I've never been to Greenland before, and but I've done mountaineering in my past so I've always

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been interested just from an adventurous side in climbing on the ice.

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So, when I found out about IceBridge and a way to bring my, you know, science

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engineering -- and right now it's more project management work -- and mesh that with

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being on the ice or being around ice, I couldn't even find a better match than IceBridge.

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Other than work, the coolest thing I did when I was there,

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one weekend we kinda had off. It's not trivial getting out to the edge of the ice sheet,

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and then you get there and you see literally, the edge of the Greenland ice sheet.

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Which I had imagined being just like this flat natural curve-down, but it was literally a huge ice wall.

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So, they even warn you -- don't step onto the ice sheet 'cause

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huge pieces of ice could fall on your head.  Anyway, we went there and I thought it would be cool to collect

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"ice samples" for my friends. So I had my mountaineering Nalgene bottles and

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a little knife and etched off some pieces of it and brought it back to the U.S. so I could give little