National Aeronautics and Space Administration Earth Science Nugget

National Aeronautics and Space Administration Earth Science Nugget Student Airborne Research Program Emily Schaller

NASA Student Airborne Research Program (SARP) • • • College students study the Earth from NASA’s DC-8 flying laboratory (June 15 -August 8, 2014). Eight-week summer internship program designed to expose advanced undergraduate students to NASA Earth and airborne science and engineering • Thirty-two undergraduates from thirty-two different colleges and universities in twenty states with majors that span the STEM disciplines Program Elements: • • • Experience with instrument integration, flight planning, and data collection on five science flights on the NASA DC-8 from NASA Armstrong in Palmdale, CA Research projects in the atmosphere, oceans and land • Whole Air Sampling of California Central Valley and Los Angeles pollution • In Situ Aerosol and Gas Measurements • Remote Sensing of the Coastal Ocean • Remote Sensing of Forests Remote sensing and in situ sampling techniques employed Field trips for ground truth validation measurements Sample and data analysis after the research flights at the University of California Irvine Formal presentation of results and conclusions at the end of the program • In 2013, eleven students went on to present firstauthor posters at the American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting SARP is managed by NASA's Ames Research Center through the National Suborbital Education and Research Center (NSERC) at the University of North Dakota. SARP participant Jonathan Hemingway, an applied meteorology and computational mathematics major from Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Florida, assists in installation of the Whole Air Sampler instrument on NASA's DC-8 flying laboratory (June 18, 2014). SARP students, mentors and faculty members inside the NASA DC-8 airborne laboratory during the first SARP science flight (June 23, 2014) Emily Schaller emily. schaller@nasa. gov