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[Aircraft noise, music] Narrator: For the next several weeks

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NASA’s Operation IceBridge will have not one but two campaigns surveying polar ice,

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one in the Arctic and one in the Antarctic.

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Both missions will measure the ice using a laser altimeter and a photographic mapper

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and both will be flying on smaller, faster aircraft than usual.

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The Antarctic campaign will be timed to provide an annual snapshot of the region

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after the winter accumulation of snow and ice.

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IceBridge flew a similar Arctic campaign last spring out of Greenland, but for the

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first time is returning north for a post-melt season campaign as well.

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Kurtz: So, now that the summer has progressed, the snow has melted

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the ice has melted -- we're going back, right at the end of this melt season.

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Hopefully before a lot of snow begins to fall. And then by surveying it

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again, we see, if we see that the surface lowered a certain amount

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that tells us well, how much snow did we lose, how much ice did we lose.

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We can tie this in with what are called surface mass balance models.

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Narrator: IceBridge will be using a G-V aircraft from the National Center

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for Atmospheric Research for the Antarctic campaign and a

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Falcon 20 provided by NASA Langley Research Center for the Arctic.

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Going with smaller aircraft represents something of a scientific tradeoff,

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as they can survey more area, but carry less of a payload.

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Sonntag: With other IceBridge campaigns, which typically use larger aircraft than

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the Langley Falcon behind us, we put a lot of instruments on,

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a dozen or so instruments. Because this is a smaller platform, a more limited scope of operations,

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we're only putting two major instruments on board. That's the Airborne Topographic Mapper

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and the Digitial Mapping System. Both are optical instruments. The first one, the

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Airborne Topographic Mapper, or ATM for short, is a scanning laser altimeter,

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And what that does is it fires out several thousand laser shots every second,

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and we also measure the position and orientation of the aircraft

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and the direction of which the lasers, laser shots rather, are exiting the aircraft,

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all those things are measured very accurately very carefully. And that lets us assign

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once we do all the measurements, that lets us assign a latitude, a longitude,

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and a height to the spot where each one of those laser shots bounces off

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the ground, off the ice in our case. And that lets us build up a very very detailed

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and very accurate topographic map of a swath of measurements beneath the aircraft.

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The Digital Mapping System supplements that. It does some the same kind of

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stuff but it does it in a passive manner. It's really a fancy camera is

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not a bad way to think about it. It's a photogrammetric camera so, in a similar manner

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to the ATM, you can assign a latitude, a longitude, and an altitude

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to every pixel within every image that comes back, and the images are shot

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about once every second. Narrator: The Antarctic campaign will also feature the

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DMS photographic system, and a laser altimeter, called LVIS.

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Hoffton: So LVIS is a high-altitude laser altimeter system.

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It flies at about 10 kilometers above the surface and we have a

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two kilometer wide swath, and we measure the topographic information

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within that swath, as well as the three-dimensional surface structure.

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And that's very useful for measuring and monitoring ice sheets where repeated

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measurements can tell you whether the ice sheet is growing or shrinking over time,

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and its contribution to sea level. We have a series of lines

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that are distributed across the West Antarctic Ice Sheet and the Peninsula, as well as

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over the sea ice that's in the Weddell Sea and in the Bellingshausen.

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The flights that we will be doing will be 10 hours long. We take off from Punta Arenas

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which is in the southern portion of Chile, and then