Credit: NASA photo/Ken Ulbrich
NASA’s ER-2 taking off with the air-LUSI moonlight collection equipment on board.
Last week, scientists from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the United States Geological Survey (USGS) and the University of Guelph sent a telescope to the top of the sky, almost to space itself. The trip was a moonlight-gathering mission that has yielded some of the best measurements ever taken of the brightness, or more specifically the surface reflectance, of Earth’s nearest neighbor, the Moon.
The ultimate goal of the work is to improve measurements made by satellites that look down at Earth and help researchers track weather patterns, trends in crop health, the locations of harmful algal blooms in water and much more.
NIST’s equipment flew aboard NASA’s ER-2, a “near-space plane” that travels as high as 21 kilometers (about 13 miles) above sea level. That kind of distance, twice the cruising altitude of a typical commercial aircraft, got the equipment above 95% of Earth’s atmosphere, which interferes with moonlight measurements. The mission, called the Airborne Lunar Spectral Irradiance Mission (air-LUSI), launched from the NASA Armstrong Flight Research Center in California.
Researchers want to accurately measure the spectrum of moonlight so that the moon can be used as a reference to calibrate satellite imagers. However, measuring this spectrum from the ground is challenging because the atmosphere distorts the moonlight, shifting the spectrum. This animation illustrates the NIST team's solution, which is to place the measurement equipment in a high altitude plane called the ER-2 and take the spect ..Support the originator by clicking the read the rest link below.
